Democrat National Convention Organizers Claim $500,000 Worth of Electronics Lost or Stolen Months After Charlotte Convention

Months after the Democrat National Convention in Charlotte, NC wrapped up, Convention organizers have filed a police report for lost and stolen electronics worth $465,197. The pricetag for some of the missing has raised some eyebrows and led to speculation that the monetary value of the missing electronics has been vastly overstated in an attempt to collect more than the original price of the items from the insurance company.

'How inflated could it be?' you might be asking yourself. Try $75,537 for a MacBook Pro, $54,250 for a missing Blackberry or $30,503 for a lost iPhone, according to a report filed with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in May.

Other items reported to have gone missing at the convention included two iPads worth around $15,000 each, laptops listed at $40,000, $34,000 and $25,000 each, and other miscellaneous items worth far more than their list price.

The report claimed that 40 items were reported lost and one item – the most highly valued one, the $75,000 MacBook Pro – was stolen.

The apparently inflated prices were reported in May with the Charlotte Police Department by Kenneth Hardy, deputy in-house counsel for the Democratic National Convention Committee, on behalf of the DNCC Host Committee.

While proprietary software and programs can increase the value of a laptop, Blackberry, smartphone or tablet, companies like Apple [NASDAQ- AAPL] list items like the missing 13 inch MacBook Pro starting at $1199, the police report file by the DNCC Host Committee values the same computer at $75,537- more than a year's wage for most Americans.

The police report filing comes after Duke Energy [NYSE- DUK] announced that they had completely written off a $10 million line of credit and loans for the Charlotte DNC host committee in February.

The Charlotte host committee had repaid just $1 million as of the end of the year and still owed $9 million in loans and another $1 million in outstanding bills, according to the latest filing with the Federal Election Commission.

The financial backing from Duke comes despite vows by Democratic Party officials to put on the convention without corporate cash.

Organizers broke that pledge after they were unable to hit their $36.7-million fundraising goal, drawing $5 million from a separate civic committee financed by companies such as Bank of America, Duke Energy and AT&T to rent the the Time Warner Arena for the event.

a Duke official said that at least $6 million of the money owed to the utility would be written off as a business expense.

Millions On West Coast, Arizona Left Without Power Overnight After Blackout Triggered in Arizona

Traffic signals, street lights and crossing signals remain dark at sunset in Cardiff, CA on the night of September 8th. Mike Blake- Reuters photo

Federal regulators are looking into the cause of a prolonged blackout that left millions of people without electricity in southern California, Western Arizona and the northern part of Baja California, Mexico on Thursday afternoon and on into the early morning hours of Friday.

Arizona Public Service Co. said that the problems began at about 3:30 p.m. Thursday when a 115-mile high-power line that runs from west of Phoenix to the Yuma area switched out of service.

APS had an employee working in the Yuma-area substation where the line connects, but officials are unsure if that worker caused the line's failure, said Daniel Froetscher, APS vice president of energy delivery.

"We don't know whether it was related, but we have been very transparent with the work we were doing there, and will investigate whether there is a relationship," he said.

Power wasn't lost immediately, with the first customer calls coming about 10 minutes after the line's failure, so APS will investigate what actually prompted Yuma-area customers to lose service, he said.

"The system has contingencies," he said. "It is designed to withstand the loss of a single line feed. For about 10 minutes or so, there were no interruptions of service. The system performed as intended."

About 56,000 APS customers lost service throughout Yuma, Somerton, San Luis and Gadsden.

Those power outages cascaded west into California, where the high-power transmission line switches from APS control to the California power grid operator.

APS will investigate what allowed the problems to spread, rather than be contained by the protections built into the power system.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, North American Electric Reliability Corp. and other entities also announced Friday they would investigate the outage, possibly leading to fines.

The cascading power failures that were supposed to be localized around Yuma instead made their way west, knocking out power at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating station.

In the San Diego area, flights at Lindbergh field were halted and classes at local schools and universities were cancelled. Some beaches were shut down as nearly 2 million gallons of untreated sewage spilled into the water.

Power was restored by the early morning hours on Friday, but not before restaurants in the region experienced losses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in food that had to be discarded when refrigeration didn't work and labor when many eateries simply shut their doors to the public. Even though power had returned by Friday morning, hundreds of facilities had to remain closed until a health department alert regarding potentially dangerous tap water was lifted.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the designated media cheerleaders for the Obama Administration have insisted that the international power failure validates President Obama's call for additional stimulus spending to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Thursday's blackout was the most widespread since the August 2003 blackout that left a large swath of the Northeast as well as parts of the Midwest and the province of Ontario without electricity [I remember the 2003 blackout well. I was in rural upstate New York, blissfully unaware that there was any significant power outage for at least two hours until I drove into this one small town where their one stoplight wasn't working and their one policeman was directing traffic- NANESB!] That blackout left metropolitan areas such as New York City, Cleveland, Buffalo and Toronto without power at the height of rush hour.

High Desert Hypocrasy- Rural Nevada Good Enough to Dump Nuclear Waste In, But Not Good Enough to Build Coal Fired Power Plant?

Cross-posted with Dopenhaagen:

While doing some background research about the Nevada Northern Railway the other night, I stumbled across this press release from NV Energy earlier this year regarding a proposed coal-fired power plant in rural eastern Nevada:

NV Energy, Inc. (NYSE: NVE) today announced that it has postponed its plans to construct a coal-fired power plant in eastern Nevada due to increasing environmental and economic uncertainties surrounding its development. The company will not move forward with construction of the coal plant until the technologies that will capture and store greenhouse gasses are commercially feasible, which is not likely before the end of the next decade.

If I understand this correctly, dumping copious amounts of nuclear waste at the DOE's Yucca Mountain site is perfectly fine and dandy, but a coal-fired power plant that would create jobs and serve the needs of people in Nevada and surrounding states is 100% unacceptable because of the carbon output.

What disconnect?