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Vladimir Putin's chosen successor Dmitry Medvedev is set for a landslide victory in Russia's presidential election, according to an exit poll and early results. First official results from the Central Election Commission showed Mr Medvedev was leading with more than 64% of the votes after ballots from 16% of polling stations had been counted. Sky's Moscow correspondent Alex Rossi said: "As election dramas go, this was never going to be nail-biting - it was not going to be a cliff-hanger. "We all knew Dmitry Medvedev would romp home to victory against the three non-competitors he's been lined up against. Essentially...

The Dixie Chicks cleaned up this morning with Grammy nominations. They received the big three: Best Album, Song and Record for “Taking the Long Way” and the single, “Not Ready to Make Nice.” They got two more, for performance in the country category, and their producer, Rick Rubin, was also nominated. Not bad, considering the flack they took in the three years leading up to the album’s release

WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 — New electronic voting machines have arrived in Yolo County, Calif., but there is one hitch: the audio program for the visually impaired in some of them works only in Vietnamese. “Talk about panic,” said Freddy Oakley, the county’s top election official. “I’ve got gray-haired ladies as poll workers standing around looking stunned.” As dozens of states are enforcing new voter registration laws and switching to paperless electronic voting systems, officials across the country are bracing for an Election Day with long lines and heightened confusion, followed by an increase in the number of contested results. In...

Welcome to The Pulse, the place to find out what the sports world is thinking. Every day on ESPN.com, SportsNation registers its opinion on a wide range of topics by casting votes and chatting with experts in The Show. We collect the daily highlights and put them in The Pulse. Story of the Day: Super Bore Bill Leavy wasn't the only unhappy viewer. Upon further review, SportsNation finds insufficient reason to get excited about the Pittsburgh Steelers winning Super Bowl XL in Detroit on Sunday. By beating the Seattle Seahawks 21-10, the Steelers gave Jerome Bettis the perfect parting gift...

Hugo Chavez wants your vote Looking for something to be alarmed about? Forget Dubai. Try Venezuela’s potential takeover of the U.S. voting apparatus. A secretive, intransparent company called ‘Smartmatic’ that’s known to have ties to the Venezuelan government, has just bought a U.S. voting machine company called Sequoia. And the deal has gotten no scrutiny from federal regulators, who cite outdated criteria for national military security as their only watchpoint. That’s right, Venezuela, a country that holds the dirtiest, filthiest most intransparent and fraudulent elections in the hemisphere, elections that match those of Zimbabwe or Belarus, has just got its...

This past Monday, CBS, otherwise known as See? BS!, Al-Jazeera West, and the Corrupt Broadcasting System, proved once again that it is nothing but a shameless propaganda tool of the Democrat party, by releasing the results of a poll it rigged... uh... conducted recently showing that President Bush's popularity rating has plummeted to an all-time low of 34 percent. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/27/opinion/polls/main1350874.shtml

A case filed in Superior Court in Sacramento this week could reveal which state legislator or legislators are responsible for avoiding the competitive bidding process mandated by the California Public Contract Code. The purposes of the Contract Code are to “[protect] the public from misuse of public funds,” to “provide all qualified bidders with a fair opportunity to enter the bidding process, thereby stimulating competition in a manner conducive to sound fiscal practices” and to “eliminate favoritism, fraud, and corruption in the awarding of public contracts.” According to the case, the California legislature has been disregarding these principles and getting...

SLAIN AGENT: I DON'T BELIEVE U.S. VERSION-COMMUNIST LEADER (AGI) - Rome, Italy, March 5 - "A day that was supposed to be happy changed into pain and anger. I don't believe a word of the American version. It's clear that they are trying to hide what really happened. The Americans deliberately shot at the Italians. It's huge," said the secretary of the Italian Communist Party, Oliviero Diliberto, commenting on what took place after the liberation of the journalist Giuliana Sgrena. Diliberto said that "the entire centre left (in Italy) should ask the withdrawal of our troops in Parliament. Enough...

Saturday is not normally the worst day of the week to read the New York Times. On Friday, one has to suffer through Paul Krugman's screeds blaming all the world's ills except for the tsunami on President Bush. Sunday brings Maureen Dowd and her special keyboard where R has been replaced by Rummy, and Frank Rich blasting the intolerant God believers in the red states. But Saturday, the week's lowest circulation day, includes a column by David Brooks, the conservative that liberals dislike the least. If one concedes, as the Times' new ombudsman Daniel Okrent has, that the Times is...

Managua, Jan 10 (EFE).- Nicaraguans overwhelmingly reject the new political accord between the Liberals and the Sandinistas to ratify the constitutional reforms they are pushing that reduce the president's power, according to a poll released Monday. The telephone survey by M&R Consultores, conducted Saturday among 620 people of both sexes aged 16-65 and published Monday in the daily La Prensa, shows that 77 percent of the public does not approve of the pact between the country's two largest political forces.

London 27.11.04 | Freezing temperatures have not dented the Ukrainians to go out by the thousands and stand up in protest for what they believe was a rigged election. The hypocritical international community has deemed the election as fraudulent and has had no recourse but to take into consideration the allegations made by opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, who is demanding a re-run of last Sunday’s polls. Demanding, that’s right. Compare that to Venezuela, which has had two rigged elections in the past 3 months. Contrast the climatic conditions of the two countries and further try and correlate the reactions of...

States Ranked From Smartest to Dumbest The smartest state in the union for the second consecutive year is Massachusetts. The dumbest, for the third year in a row, is New Mexico. Search by state for reports on the local schools. These are the findings of the Education State Rankings, a survey by Morgan Quitno Press of hundreds of public school systems in all 50 states. States were graded on a variety of factors based on how they compare to the national average. These included such positive attributes as per-pupil expenditures, public high school graduation rates, average class size, student reading...

First of all, this election was definitely rigged. I have no doubt about it. It's a statistical impossibility that Bush got 8 million more votes than he got last time. In 2000, he got 15 million votes from right-wing Christians, and there are approximately 19 million of them in the country. They were eager to get the other 4 million. That was pretty much Karl Rove's strategy to get Bush elected. But given Bush's low popularity ratings and the enormous number of new voters -- who skewed Democratic -- there is no way in the world that Bush got 8...

Watching ABC, CBS, or NBC news, you would never know that Iranian civilians are now being killed while protesting against their country’s Islamist dictators. You probably wouldn’t know that Iran is considered to be the “world's ‘most active state sponsor of terrorism.’” You most surely haven’t heard that between 10,000 and 15,000 Iranians risk life and liberty to run web logs (“blogs”) opposing their government. Maybe you’ve heard that Iran’s rulers are secretly building nuclear weapons, but did you know that Britain, France, Germany, and Russia have sold nuclear technologies to Iran? Have you heard that Iran now has ballistic...

Windsurfing in the Persian GulfWHY JOHN KERRY IS DANGEROUS FOR AMERICA by Mia T, 9.24.04 Kerry is UNFIT #21: THUMBSUCKER SERIES-BOARDHEAD TO THE RESCUE- (viewing movie requires Flash Player 7, available HERE) "I mean, I was in Safwan. I went there when the signing of the armistice took place at the end of the war." John KerryThe O'Reilly Factor, 2001 ohn Kerry's odd phrasing, above, suggests he was more likely windsurfing in the Persian Gulf than witnessing the signing of the Gulf-War cease fire. (Kerry's prior relevant vote, as well as his tawdry dilettantish tendencies, would tend to support this...

TWISTED: LA Times Poll Had Sample With 38% Democrats, 25% Republicans Tue Jun 15 2004 10:13:47 ET Sen. John Kerry "has taken big lead," according "to an L.A. Times poll." But the Times poll that showed Kerry "beating Bush by 7 points" has created a controversy over whether the poll's sample accurately reflects the population as whole, ROLL CALL reports on Tuesday. "Not counting independents, the Times' results were calculated on a sample made up of 38 percent Democrats and 25 percent Republicans -- a huge and unheard-of margin," ROLL CALL claims.

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - With a record number of voters casting electronic ballots on Super Tuesday, election officials from California to Maryland are beefing up security to prevent problems ranging from software glitches to hackers. In California, new security measures range from random tests of touch-screen machines by independent computer experts to a recommendation that poll workers prevent voters from carrying cell phones or other wireless devices into voting booths. At least 10 million people in at least two dozen states are expected to cast primary ballots on machines built by Diebold, Sequoia Voting Systems, Electronic Systems & Software...

Freep this Newsweek poll--Kerry vs.Bush. Also questions regarding gay marriage.

Affirmative-action case rigged?Memos urge Sen. Kennedy to slow judicial confirmation to affect ruling Posted: November 18, 20036:29 p.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com Newly discovered internal Democratic staff memos raise the question of whether one of the most significant rulings on affirmative action in a quarter-century was rigged. According to the memos obtained by the Washington Times, staffers for Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass, who is a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sought to delay one of President Bush's nominees to the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals specifically to affect the outcome of the then-pending affirmative-action case involving admissions at the...

Is the Pope Catholic? The latest evidence of manipulation came Monday, the last day of the quarter. On that day, the majority of mutual funds beat the market. While that would seem to be a mathematical impossibility, researchers take it as evidence of a manipulative practice that is known in the mutual fund world as "marking the close." The SEC defines "marking the close," which is illegal, as "attempting to influence the closing price of a stock by executing purchase or sale orders at or near the close of the market." Right before the close, in other words, funds will...

Defense confident Daniel Pearl's accused kidnapper will go free By ZARAR KHAN, Associated Press HYDERABAD, Pakistan (July 1, 2002 5:44 p.m. EDT) - Lawyers for the chief defendant in the kidnap-slaying of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl predicted Monday that their client will be acquitted. The defense optimism came after testimony that appeared to support their contention that Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh was illegally detained and, on that basis, the charges against him should be dismissed. "You will see he will be acquitted in this case," said Abdul Waheed Katpar, a lawyer for Saeed. The evidence could also boost...