Too Close To Call

For many weeks the polls and the pundits have been saying that the Italian elections were more or less a formality. Incumbent Silvio Berlusconi, the leader of the center-right government was said to be doomed to challenger Romano Prodi.

As soon as the voting closed earlier today, the pundits were out again, declaring that they had been right all along, Prodi was in by a landslide.

Well maybe not.

Pollster Nexus said with 95 percent of the vote in the Senate counted, Berlusconi was projected to take 158 seats to the centre-left's 151. The margin of error for the sample was between 1 and 3 percentage points.

The current count in the Chamber of Deputies is also too close to call. But current projections based on 44 percent of the vote gave Berlusconi's centre-right alliance a wafer-thin 49.9 percent to 49.6 percent edge over challenger Romano Prodi in the lower house.

Prodi postponed a news conference after the latest projections were released.

The Senate and lower chamber of parliament have equal powers, and any coalition would have to control both in order to form a government. Berlusconi and Prodi have said new elections should be called if neither side controls both houses.

Immigration

Looking at the news today it seems the latest compromise on immigration reform has failed.

In looking at possible solutions I must admit to having mixed views as the legalist in me fights with the pragmatist in me.

I am a firm supporter of legal immigration. Our nation was built on the concept that the peoples of the world should come here and build a better life. But part of the deal is that you obey the law. Those who come here in violation of the law demean those who went through the proper process. That's what the process is there for.

So my basic instict is to say if you came here illegally you should be made to leave and go through the proper channels.

However it is here that the pragmatist in me takes over.

Right now the estimate is there are 10 to 15 million illegals in this country out of 300 million people. They are spread out across the country and have spent years learning how to hide.

So as a practical matter how do we find these 10 or 15 million people and how do we go about getting them out of the country ?

It would take a massive program that would cost billions of dollars to accomplish this and it could take decades.

While they did break the law, many of these illegals have become, to one degree or another, productive members of society.

Therefore I do think we need to take a pragmatic approach to this problem. Work with those who want to become part of the system and work out a program of amnesty. Not an out and out free pass, but a program where they pay penalties and work through the citizenship process.

For those who do not choose to participate, we can and should deport them.

Cynthia McKinney Is An Idiot

Capitol Police on Monday sent the results of their investigation of Rep. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia to a federal prosecutor, who will decide, possibly this week, whether to press assault charges against her for striking a police officer.

The police filing left open the question of whether McKinney should be charged with simple assault, a misdemeanor, or assault on a police officer, a felony, police and legal authorities said.

Meanwhile, African-American clergy and elected officials rallied to support the six-term congresswoman at an Atlanta church Monday, and in an appearance on CNN with her lawyers, McKinney again contended that she was the victim of a white police officer's racial bias.

McKinney was stopped by a Capitol policeman while she was going around a security checkpoint in a House office building last Wednesday. Members of Congress are allowed to skirt those checkpoints, but the officer, not recognizing McKinney, tried to stop her. A scuffle ensued.

If the office of U.S. Attorney Ken Wainstein decides not to pursue charges, the police investigation would simply end. If the prosecutor decides to pursue charges, police would need a judge to approve the arrest warrant. The prosecutor has a third option of presenting the police findings to a grand jury, which legal authorities said could add weeks to the process.

The police officer who stopped McKinney touched her shoulder or arm, witnesses have said. That prompted McKinney to spin around and strike the officer, though there are conflicting reports as to whether she slapped him, punched him in the chest or struck him with a cell phone.

McKinney was not wearing a special lapel pin given to members of Congress to make them easier to identify. She also has changed her hairstyle since posing for her official House portrait, the picture police would check to identify her.

It does not show her encounter with the police officer, according to officials familiar with it.

While authorities in Washington were inching closer toward a decision on whether to charge McKinney, about two dozen lawmakers, community activists and clergy stood in support of the DeKalb County Democrat at Community Church of God in southwest Atlanta.

"It's really not about Cynthia McKinney. It's about African-Americans in America who are victims of racial profiling every day," said Tyrone Brooks, a state lawmaker and president of the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials.

Alabama Idiocy

Possibly the stupidest law in the world.

Car Seats

Charlie Sheen is Nuts

Charlie Sheen is now officialy nuttier than his Dad.

He has decided that 9/11 was a giant government conspiracy.

The towers were not his by 2 planes, only one and it was not airliner.

The Pentagon was not hit by a plane at all.

The towers were brought down by explosives.

Charlie Sheen

Iowa Woman Fakes Death

In the beyond stupid category....

An Iowa woman allegedly faked her death to avoid paying parking tickets.

Police say 36-year-old Kimberly Du was caught after she got another ticket a month after her 'death', reports said.Investigators said Du faked her own obituary and forged an afidavit telling a judge she had died in a car accident.

In her letter she allegedly included a phony obituary, made to look like a page from The Des Moines Register's website.

The case began to unravel when investigators said Du was stopped for another traffic ticket - a month after the obituary was dated.

If convicted she'll face up to five years in prison for fraud - instead of the $500 fine she might have been expected to pay for failing to pay her parking tickets. Ananova.com

"The state still has to convince a jury of 12, but faking your own death is not a good idea," said Bob Rigg, of the Drake Law Clinic.

Enigma Cracked By Computers

Sixty years after the end of World War II, a network of several thousand PCs has cracked a message enciphered with the famous Enigma machine.

The M4 Message Breaking Project, started by Stefan Krah, a German amateur cryptographer took on three messages intercepted by British code-breakers during WWII, but never cracked by Bletchley Park.

The code breakers at Bletchley included computing pioneer Alan Turing and used a combination of human intelligence, guesswork, and elementary computing, called "bombs" to decipher messages."

At various times, Bletchley Park could read virtually all Enigma-ciphered messages to and from U-boats at sea, which was instrumental in locating and sinking the submarines, or steering convoys away from U-boat wolfpacks.

The three messages were enciphered using the vaunted Enigma, a machine that relied on a series of user-set rotors and an accompanying plugboard to encrypt text messages before they were radioed from U-boats in the North Atlantic to the German navy's headquarters ashore.

In January, Krah's Web site posted Unix and Windows versions of an open-source client that runs in the background on each machine. As in other distributed-computing projects -- such as the one recently started by the BBC to help model climate change -- the message-breaking chore was broken into small pieces, then parceled out to individual machines that had installed the software.

On Feb. 20, Krah announced that the first message had been broken.

The Enigma-enciphered message, which looked like this:

NCZWV USXPN YMINH ZXMQX SFWXW LKJAH SHNMC
OCCAK UQPMK CSMHK SEINJ USBLK IOSXC KUBHM
LLXCS JUSRR DVKOH ULXWC CBGVL IYXEO AHXRH
KKFVD REWEZ LXOBA FGYUJ QUKGR TVUKA MEURB
VEKSU HHVOY HABCJ WMAKL FKLMY FVNRI ZRVVR
TKOFD ANJMO LBGFF LEOPR GTFLV RHOWO PBEKV
WMUQF MPWPA RMFHA GKXII BG

Actually read, said Krah:

"F T 1132/19 Inhalt:
Bei Angriff unter Wasser gedrückt.
Wabos. Letzter Gegnerstand 0830 Uh
r AJ 9863, 220 Grad, 8 sm. Stosse nach.
14 mb. fällt, NNO 4, Sicht 10.
Looks"

And was translated into English to:
"F T 1132/19 contents:
Forced to submerge during attack.
Depth charges. Last enemy position 0830h
AJ 9863, [course] 220 degrees, [speed] 8 knots.
[I am] following [the enemy].
[barometer] falls 14 mb, [wind] nor-nor-east,
[force] 4, visibility 10 [nautical miles].
Looks"

Hartwig Looks, the captain of the U-264, was among the 52 survivors of a depth charge attack by two British sloops, the HMS Woodpecker and HMS Starling, on Feb. 19, 1944.

So far, several runs have been completed against one of the other messages, but with no success. "This does not mean that this particular message can't be broken with this method,"

Krah wrote on the project's blog. "Some messages require many more walks through the search space before a break occurs."

Currently, about 5,000 computers are participating in the project. Users who want to install the distributed-computing client can find it on the M4 Web site.