Blue Crab Boulevard

There was quite a lot of buzz right after the election about an election official in Florida reporting that a very rare stamp may have been used on an absentee ballot. Before sealing the ballot in with others, the official was pretty sure he saw an "inverted Jenny" stamp. There are only about 100 of these printing mistakes known to exist, so this would have been a very big deal.

Except the stamp was fake.

The blue and red stamp, which took its name from an image of a biplane accidentally printed upside down, was spotted by a county commissioner in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, last month on an envelope that contained a ballot for the November 7 election.

The find caused a stir among stamp collectors. Only 100 of the misprinted stamps have ever been found, making them rare in the world of philately.

An Inverted Jenny stamp could be worth $300,000, experts have said. A block of four was traded recently for another rare stamp in a transaction valued at nearly $3 million.

Experts examined the stamp on Monday at the behest of the Broward County Elections office.

"To a trained philatelist, it's pretty obvious that it's a counterfeit," Randy Shoemaker of Professional Stamp Experts, a stamp grading service, told reporters at a news conference in Broward County.

Mercer Bristow, an expert with the American Philatelic Society who also examined the stamp, said both the printing method and the perforations on the edge of the stamp gave it away as a fake.

This one sounded fishy from the beginning, which is why I never posted about it. There are simply too few of these items that someone would screw up and use it. Through diligent work by one of our highly medicated operatives from the Magic 8-Ball photography and Trawling Service, Ltd., we were able to obtain this exclusive look at the inverted Jenny stamp that fooled the election worker.

Showtime. The Associated Press is reporting that the prime minister of Fiji is reporting that a full scale coup is underway. Australia has refused to intervene militarily.

SUVA, Fiji - Fiji's elected leader said Tuesday a military takeover was under way in the South Pacific country as armed troops surrounded his house and other government buildings in a lockdown of the capital.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard said he refused a request from Fiji's besieged prime minister Tuesday for "military intervention" to end the coup. New Zealand called the coup an "outrage" and said it was cutting military ties with Fiji, the first international sanctions.

Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase said it was not clear who was in control of his tiny country after heavily armed soldiers set up check points around the capital, Suva, and seized official vehicles from government ministers. The prime minister said he was not able to leave his house and go to work because troops took his car.

"There are some things that aren't clear," Qarase told the Legend radio network by telephone, when he was asked if he was still in charge. "If the military has completed the takeover, then they are in control. If they have not completed the takeover, then we are still the government of the day."

He said he had received information that troops would take him into custody sometime Tuesday, though he said that was unconfirmed.

Qarase turned to Australia for help in preventing a full military takeover.

"The prime minister of Fiji rang me and asked for Australian military intervention in response to the coup," the Australian prime minister told reporters. "I indicated to him that that would not be possible."

There are a lot of ethnic tensions driving this right now:

A coup would be the fourth in 19 years for the country. The military twice grabbed power in 1987 to ensure political supremacy for indigenous Fijians among a population that includes a large ethnic Indian minority.

Gunmen angry that those advantages were being eroded seized Parliament in a 2000 coup that brought Qarase, a moderate nationalist, to power in a deal brokered by Bainimarama. Qarase has since won two elections but his relations with the military commander have long since soured.

So, yet another coup in the Pacific region. Not a good year for that region, is it?

UPDATE: Washington Post coverage here.

SUVA, Fiji — Fiji's military commander said Tuesday that he had seized control of the country and dismissed the elected prime minister after a weeks-long standoff between the two leaders rooted in tension between the South Pacific nation's indigenous people and its ethnic Indian minority.

Commodore Frank Bainimarama told a news conference that he was using special powers under the constitution to assume the powers of the president and replace Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase.

This report is highly troubling on several levels. Fox News is reporting the high level of suspicion in the international reinsurance community that North Korea is running a very elaborate - and lucrative - insurance scam. It is troubling on the level of seeing a nation being run as a straight-up criminal enterprise. The other troubling aspect is that the international insurance and reinsurance markets are even doing any business with this nation.

A growing number of major underwriters around the world strongly suspect that communist dictator Kim Jong-Il's regime is running an elaborate major insurance and reinsurance scam on them, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars or more.

The alleged fraud involves a wide variety of North Korean industrial and personal calamities where insurers have been presented with perfect government-controlled documentation of accidents, including deaths, along with carefully gathered photographic evidence, all compiled in a startlingly brief time.

That paperwork is coupled with a resistance to letting foreign insurance adjusters examine some of the most crucial physical evidence, except after long delays and under a watchful eye, if at all.

The growing concern in the reinsurance industry is that the property damage being claimed is vastly overstated, and the circumstances of some alleged accidents may have been altered, or that deaths for which insurance payment is claimed may have had nothing to do with the accidents.

Death is hardly a rare thing in North Korea, where millions are estimated to have expired from famine, flood and government repression in the past decade — but the number of apparently ordinary people in the dictatorship who have suddenly been found to have foreign-backed life insurance is raising insurers' eyebrows.

The chief concern is that only the Kim Jong-Il regime — a government that is known to be brutal, unscrupulous and desperately short of foreign currency — controls the information required to trigger the payments.

According to Michael Payton, a lawyer who represents several of the major insurers, the full extent of the reinsurance claims may involve more than $150 million. U.K. insurers facing these claims have only just begun to talk to each other about the potential scale of their North Korean losses.

North Korean insurance risk is also handled in a wide variety of other Western European markets, and as far away as Russia, India and Indonesia.

So far, there is little attempt to begin discussing the fraud possibilities across those national boundaries.

"I've never seen anything like it before," said Payton, senior partner in the London-based international law firm of Clyde & Co., which specializes in insurance law. "The apparent involvement of the state in every detail of these claims, coupled with the impossibility of obtaining the usual corroborative facts independent of the state, makes these claims unique, in my experience."

The suspected scam involves the huge international market for reinsurance, in which insurers reduce their risk on every kind of accident, from environmental catastrophes and crop failure to airline and auto crashes, by reselling much of their policy exposure to other syndicates of insurers outside their own countries. Huge sums are routinely covered in reinsurance; globally, the reinsurance market last year was valued at some $1.5 trillion.

North Korea is starving its own people to death and international insurance companies are doing business with Kim's government? What the hell? You know, there were banks and insurance companies that did business with Nazi Germany, too. This is disgusting.

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard just hate being the bearers of still more bad holiday news. We already had to tell you about the unfortunate banning of Santa's Butt and the Seig Heil Santa, we had to tell the kids about the unfortunate fate of Rudolph the Red-Nosed lunchmeat, and now we have to bring even more sad Christmas-themed news. It seems that Blitzen, one of Santa's hitherto reliable flying reindeer has turned to a life of crime.

Yes, he stole himself and went joyriding.

OSLO (AP) — It took the long arm of the law to restore order when a renegade reindeer sprinted along a highway in Norway's Arctic, nearly causing a series of traffic accidents.

The long arm belonged to Acting Sheriff Klemet Klemetsen, who reached through the window of his police cruiser and grabbed the fleeing animal by the skin of the neck while driving alongside it.

"That was a new experience for me," the 50-year-old officer told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "It isn't normal procedure for a police officer to grab a reindeer through his car window. I've never heard of it before."

Motorists had called the police to warn of a panicked reindeer, which had been frightened by stray dogs, sprinting down the main road into Kautokeino, a key town for Norway's Sami reindeer herders, on Monday.

Klemetsen said by telephone that several of the drivers said they had nearly been in car crashes because of the reindeer, and that he knew he had to do something quickly before someone got hurt.

He spotted the reindeer, turned on his blue flashing lights, and set off in pursuit on the icy road.

"He was fast," said Klemetsen, who estimated that he was driving at about 20 miles an hour when he pulled up alongside the reindeer.

"Then I had to figure out what to do," he said. Klemetsen rolled down his window, closed in on the antlered culprit, and grabbed it. Then he brought the small, roughly 65 pound reindeer to a halt by maintaining his grip, and slowing down the police car.

Please note that a high-speed chase in Norway is not quite up to American standards. Reaching the blistering pace of 20 mph ain't exactly Bullitt. On the other hand, Klemetsen may have invented the Norwegian equivalent of goat roping! Sadly, Blitzen will be in the Kautokeino city hoosegow through the Christmas holiday. Santa is now down to seven tiny reindeer. It could be a long night for the big guy.

NASA announced plans to go back to the moon - and stay this time. Robert Heinlein would be dancing about now, I suspect. A lunar colony was the setting for - or figured heavily in - many of his novels, including the one this post is titled after.

HOUSTON, Texas – NASA has decided to pursue a base on the Moon. The space agency rolled out today a strategy and rationale for robotic and human exploration of the Moon—determining that a lunar outpost is the best approach to achieve a sustained, human presence on the Moon.

The base would be built in incremental steps, starting with four-person crews making several seven-day visits. The first mission would begin by 2020, with the base growing over time, beefed up with more power, mobility rovers and living quarters.

The Moon base would eventually support 180-day lunar stays, a stretch of time seen as the best avenue to establish a permanent presence there, as well as prepare for future human exploration of Mars.

Here at the NASA Johnson Space Center, space agency planners detailed a global exploration strategy, outlining the themes and objectives of 21st century lunar exploration and the hardware needed to regain a foothold on the Moon.

NASA’s lunar plan also encourages participation by other nations, as well as non-governmental organizations and commercial groups.

Location, location, location

“We’re going to go after a lunar base,” said Scott Horowitz, NASA associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. The lunar base will be the central theme in NASA’s going back to the Moon effort, he said, in preparation to go to Mars and beyond.

As to where on the Moon such a post might be positioned—like real estate here on Earth—it’s location, location, location.

“What we’re looking at are polar locations…both the north pole and south pole,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Shana Dale. Picking between the two poles will be done once NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter begins surveying the Moon after its launch in October 2008.

One particular area that’s already receiving high marks by NASA’s lunar architecture team is at the South Pole—a spot on the rim of Shackleton Crater that’s almost permanently sunlit.

“It’s also adjacent to a permanently dark region in which there are potentially volatiles that we can extract and use,” said NASA’s Doug Cooke, Deputy Associate Administrator of the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate.

Oddly, my youngest boy started reading that classic Heinlein novel just today. He's getting used to the dialect that  Manny uses to narrate the story. But Mike already fascinates him.

Greg Tinti has a video posted that shows the pilot for an anti-Bush cartoon that Comedy Central plans to air. It's really lame, to the max.

Comedy Central has ordered "Lil' Bush: Resident of the United States," a cartoon satire that re-imagines President Bush and key executives in his administration as elementary school misfits.

The title character is surrounded by close pals like Lil' Cheney, who grumbles unintelligibly, and Lil' Condi, who pines for Lil' Bush and does his homework for him.

"Bush" is not without its risque moments. When Lil' Bush's school serves falafel instead of hot dogs for lunch in one episode, he and his pals torture the cafeteria employees with methods made famous during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Six episodes from writer-producer Donick Cary ("The Simpsons") have been ordered to air on Comedy Central next year.

"Bush" got its start in September as six five-minute clips offered by Amp'd Mobile, a U.S.-based wireless service that packages video entertainment programming with cell phone service.

I'm with Greg on this one. I could care less who gets satirized politically so long as it is funny. This isn't. Remotely. Funny. Watching it is like having a root canal with insufficient Novocaine.

The Australian government is stopping short of calling the situation in Fiji a coup at this point. However, the elected prime minister is essentially a prisoner in his own home with troops surrounding the building. But there also may be a sever split within the ranks of the military itself over the wisdom of following the course of taking over the nation.

FIJIAN Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase was a prisoner in his own home last night, surrounded by his security detail after the country's military began tightening its control, seizing a threatening police arsenal of weapons and setting up road blocks around the capital Suva.

The pressure building between the military and the Government came as Australia's intelligence pointed to a split in the military over the so-called "clean-up" campaign and warned of the potential for the situation to end in violence.

About 6.20pm (4.20pm AEDT) a truck carrying soldiers turned up at the gate of Mr Qarase's residence, and the soldiers demanded to be admitted. The police at the gate responded by saying they could not allow them in and the soldiers retreated in the presence of the international media.

Five minutes later, Mr Qarase, accompanied by two carloads of security and police, left his residence after being summoned to President Josefa Iloilo's home nearby. The President not long before had sent a letter to the military commander, Frank Bainimarama, who for weeks has been threatening a coup to "clean up" the Government.

Mr Qarase said the military who stopped him at the President's gate demanded he walk up the drive, something he refused to do, forcing his cavalcade to turn around and return home without speaking to the President.

As Commodore Bainimarama gave a much-anticipated press conference after 6pm, military units began setting up roadblocks around the capital city.

At Queen Elizabeth Barracks in Suva, Commodore Bainimarama said his troops had earlier seized guns from the police tactical response unit headquarters and the police armoury to ensure they were not used against the military.

He also revealed that his officers had taken weapons from the Prime Minister's bodyguards by mistake, but then Commodore Bainimarama cut short the press conference and refused to take questions.

I'd probably be inclined to call this a coup, even if it is bloodless at this point. Generally speaking, taking the head of state prisoner is considered an unfriendly act.

Ok, if there was any doubt whatsoever that Britain has gone completely around the bend with the nanny state, this item should remove any doubt. A few people in a small village of Embsay wanted to organize a free Christmas party for locals to be able to celebrate the holiday together. A nice idea, right? Well, they thought so, until the local council bosses informed them that they would have to produce a risk assessment in order to hold the party.

Specifically, a risk assessment on the free mince pies they were planning to give away.

STUNNED villagers have been told their Christmas party will be cancelled unless they carry out a risk assessment - on mince pies.

Council bosses ordered that large posters warning revellers the pies contain nuts and suet pastry must be placed alongside festive decorations.

Local resident Steve Dobson wanted to organise a free party with a fireworks display, mince pies, mulled wine and a Santa's grotto so villagers could celebrate together.

But organisers at Embsay, North Yorks, were told they would have to carry out a "detailed risk assessment" of the refreshments and entertainment before permission could be granted.

The home-made mince pies are being baked and given free by the Embsay and East by Women's Institute. Steve said: "It is bureaucracy gone mad. I got a letter from the council saying we had to carry out a risk assessment of everything involved in the event. When I asked if that included the mince pies I was told it was."

The cocoa content and temperature of the hot chocolate must also be checked.

Steve added: "We have even had someone from the village ask us if our Santa has been checked with the Criminal Records Bureau."

The council says they just want it to be very, very safe. Really. Honest. What's next? Environmental impact statements on fruitcakes? Oh, wait, we're actually in favor of that.

UN Ambassador John Bolton has resigned his post. The White House has reluctantly accepted. This is a genuine loss for the US. Bolton was one of the few people standing up against the worst excesses of that corrupt UN bureaucracy that has become almost completely useless in recent years.

The White House resubmitted Bolton's nomination last month. But with Democrats capturing control of the next Congress, his chances of winning confirmation appeared slight. The incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democratic Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, said he saw "no point in considering Mr. Bolton's nomination again."

While Bush could not give Bolton another recess appointment, the White House was believed to be exploring other ways of keeping him in the job, perhaps by giving him a title other than ambassador. But Bolton informed the White House he intended to leave when his current appointment expires, White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino said.

Bush planned to meet with Bolton and his wife later Monday in the Oval Office.

As late as last month, Bush, through his top aides, said he would not relent in his defense of Bolton, despite unwavering opposition from Democrats who view Bolton as too combative for international diplomacy.

Perino said that among Bolton's accomplishments, he assembled coalitions addressing North Korea's nuclear activity, Iran's uranium enrichment and reprocessing work and the horrific violence in Darfur. She said he also made reform at the United Nations a top issue because the United States is searching for a more "credible" and more "effective."

"Ambassador Bolton served his country with distinction and he achieve a great deal at the United Nations," Perino said.

"Despite the support of a strong bipartisan majority of senators, Ambassdor Bolton's confirmation was blocked by a Democratic filibuster, and this is a clear example of the breakdown in the Senate confirmation process," she said. "Nominees deserve the opportunity for a clean up or down vote. Ambassador Bolton was never given that opportunity."

One of the bad precedents the Senate Democrats have set in these past few years is that of blocking appointments on a routine basis. They will come to regret making that tactic acceptable.

This is completely incredible. Two United States Senators have sent a letter to ExxonMobil demanding that they shut up and toe the line on global warming - there is no specific threat made if Exxon fails to obey the order but there is a thinly veiled threat comparing them to the tobacco industry.

Washington has no shortage of bullies, but even we can't quite believe an October 27 letter that Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe sent to ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson. Its message: Start toeing the Senators' line on climate change, or else.

We reprint the full text of the letter here, so readers can see for themselves. But its essential point is that the two Senators believe global warming is a fact, and therefore all debate about the issue must stop and ExxonMobil should "end its dangerous support of the [global warming] 'deniers.' " Not only that, the company "should repudiate its climate change denial campaign and make public its funding history." And in extra penance for being "one of the world's largest carbon emitters," Exxon should spend that money on "global remediation efforts."

The Senators aren't dumb enough to risk an ethics inquiry by threatening specific consequences if Mr. Tillerson declines this offer he can't refuse. But in case the CEO doesn't understand his company's jeopardy, they add that "ExxonMobil and its partners in denial have manufactured controversy, sown doubt, and impeded progress with strategies all-too reminiscent of those used by the tobacco industry for so many years." (Our emphasis.) The Senators also graciously copied the Exxon board on their missive.

This is amazing stuff. On the one hand, the Senators say that everyone agrees on the facts and consequences of climate change. But at the same time they are so afraid of debate that they want Exxon to stop financing a doughty band of dissenters who can barely get their name in the paper. We respect the folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, but we didn't know until reading the Rockefeller-Snowe letter that they ran U.S. climate policy and led the mainstream media around by the nose, too. Congratulations.

This is unreal. Our Senate thinks so little of the Constitution that they think that they can silence critics by Senatorial edict. Damn the First Amendment, full suppression ahead. If you tried to do as a private citizen what they are doing as representatives of the US Senate, you could be brought up on extortion charges. Think about that.