Sprint Through Swing States in Campaign’s Last Hours

Damon Winter/The New York Times

President Obama began his last day of campaigning in Madison, Wis., with Bruce Springsteen.

WASHINGTON — The presidential campaign of 2012 is now measured in hours and minutes.

Early voting has been under way for weeks across the country, but with Election Day almost here, the presidential candidates and their supporters are offering one last burst of activity in a handful of swing states that will determine the occupant of the Oval Office next year.

President Obama began his last day of campaigning in Wisconsin, a state that almost every Democratic model for an Obama victory assumes will be in his column. After being introduced by Bruce Springsteen and his voice hoarse from days of intense campaigning, the president told a crowd of 18,000 bundled up outside the state Capitol in Madison, “Our fight goes on.” He described his vision of an America where “everybody is doing their fair share, everybody is playing by the same rules, that’s why you elected me in 2008 and that’s why I’m running for a second term!”

At Mitt Romney’s morning rally earlier in Sanford, Fla., supporters chanted “45! 45! 45!” — a reference to the fact that Mr. Romney would become the nation’s 45th president if he is elected.

The Republican nominee has a hectic, state-hopping 14-hour campaign schedule on Monday, traveling from Florida to Ohio, Virginia and New Hampshire.

During his speech just outside Orlando, Mr. Romney toned down his sometimes harsh words for Mr. Obama, focusing on a sunny outlook for the country under a Romney presidency that he vowed would be friendly to business and diplomatic to Democrats.

“If there is anyone who is worried that the last four years are the best we can do, or if there is anyone who is fearing that the American dream is fading away, or if there is anyone who wonders whether better jobs and better paychecks are a thing of the past, I have a clear and unequivocal message: with the right leadership, America is about to come roaring back,” Mr. Romney said.

“We are Americans; we can do anything,” he said. “The only thing that stands between us and some of the best years we’ve ever imagined is lack of leadership. And that is why we have elections.”

Such candidate appearances are the visual embodiment of the presidential campaigns, but they are hardly the most important in the final hours. That distinction goes to the thousands of volunteers on both sides who are deployed in swing states with the mission of making sure that supporters who have not already voted find their way to a polling place.

In Florida, Ohio and Iowa, that effort has become tied up in some legal wrangling as both parties play out the final days of their yearlong battle over provisional ballots, voter identification and early voting.

Mr. Romney has not officially weighed in on the partisan battles unfolding in Florida and Ohio over early voting and provisional ballots. But his word choice at the rally in Sanford was telling, mimicking the Republican Party’s emphasis on policing against fraudulent balloting, which Democrats have cast as attempts to suppress voting.

“Look, we have one job left,” Mr. Romney said. “And that’s to make sure that on Election Day we get, make certain that everybody who’s qualified to vote gets out to vote.”

The last-minute demands on the candidates’ schedules were intense. Three of Mr. Romney’s rallies on Monday are veritable flybys, held in airport hangars so that Mr. Romney can land, jog down the steps of his private plane to the blaring thrum of Kid Rock’s “Born Free,” and then begin taxiing to the next city nearly as soon as he has shaken the last hand and kissed the last baby.

When Mr. Romney’s plane touched down in Florida after an 18-hour day (four events in four states) just before 1 a.m. Monday, his aides had already begun setting up for the day’s rally. A “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose” sign greeted the plane, and an empty hangar waited lighted and ready for the voters who would file in just hours later.

For Mr. Obama, who held a weekend marathon across every swing state, the schedule on Monday looked almost tame by comparison. Even so, he will be hitting three states before he heads to sweet home Chicago for the night.

After his Monday morning stop in Madison, a college town, Mr. Obama will return one last time to the swing state of all swing states for a rally in Columbus, Ohio. The president has been holding on to a small lead in the polls in Ohio, and his campaign aides believe that if he wins the state, he will win the election. Unless, that is, Mr. Romney manages to sweep all the other swing states, or turn a blue state — Mr. Romney planted a flag in Pennsylvania on Sunday — red.

After Ohio, Michelle Obama will join her husband for one last rally where the two like to insist that it all started — Des Moines.

Michael Barbaro contributed reporting from Sanford, Fla., and Helene Cooper from Madison, Wis.

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Apple sells three million iPads over first weekend

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APNewsBreak: Budweiser seeks removal from 'Flight'

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Denzel Washington's character in "Flight" drinks a lot throughout the film, but his portrayal of a highly functioning alcoholic pilot isn't going down well with brewing company Anheuser-Busch or the distributor of Stolichnaya vodka.

Anheuser-Busch said Monday that it has asked Paramount Pictures Corp. to obscure or remove the Budweiser logo from the film, which at one point shows Washington's character drinking the beer while behind the wheel.

Budweiser is hardly the only alcoholic beverage shown in "Flight," which earned $25 million in its debut weekend and is likely to remain popular with audiences. Washington's character frequently drinks vodka throughout the film, with several different brands represented. William Grant & Sons, which distributes Stolichnaya in the United States, also said it didn't license its brand for inclusion in the film and wouldn't have given permission if asked.

Rob McCarthy, vice president of Budweiser, wrote in a statement to The Associated Press that the company wasn't contacted by Paramount or the production company of director Robert Zemeckis for permission to use the beer in "Flight."

"We would never condone the misuse of our products, and have a long history of promoting responsible drinking and preventing drunk driving," McCarthy wrote. "We have asked the studio to obscure the Budweiser trademark in current digital copies of the movie and on all subsequent adaptations of the film, including DVD, On Demand, streaming and additional prints not yet distributed to theaters."

A spokesman for Zemeckis referred questions to Paramount, which did not return an email message seeking comment.

James Curich, a spokesman for Stoli distributor William Grant & Sons, said the company has a strict code for how the vodka is portrayed in films and is committed to marketing it responsibly. "Considering the subject matter of this film, it is not something in which we would have participated," he wrote in an email.

Despite the companies' dissatisfaction with their inclusion in the film, experts say there is little they can do about it legally.

Trademark laws "don't exist to give companies the right to control and censor movies and TV shows that might happen to include real-world items," said Daniel Nazer, a resident fellow at Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project. "It is the case that often filmmakers get paid by companies to include their products. I think that's sort of led to a culture where they expect they'll have control. That's not a right the trademark law gives them."

Jay Dougherty, a professor at Loyola Law School, said the use of brands in films has generally been protected by the courts, even when the companies aren't pleased with the portrayals. "It wouldn't have been effective as film if we used a bunch of non-generic brands," said Doughterty, who is also the director of the school's Entertainment & Media Law Institute. "In a normal situation, if the alcohol were just there as a smaller part of the movie, they might have created an artificial brand for it."

Other vodka brands, including Absolut and Smirnoff, are also included in the film. Representatives of those companies did not return messages seeking comment.

___

Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP .

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Unlikely Model for H.I.V. Prevention: Adult Film Industry

Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

INDUSTRY DATABASE Shylar Cobi, right, a film producer, confirmed test results of the actors who perform as James Deen and Stoya.

LOS ANGELES — Before they take off all their clothes, the actors who perform as James Deen and Stoya go through a ritual unique to the heterosexual adult film industry.

First, they show each other their cellphones: Each has an e-mail from a laboratory saying he or she just tested negative for H.I.V., syphilis, chlamydia and gonorrhea.

Then they sit beside the film’s producer, Shylar Cobi, as he checks an industry database with their real names to confirm that those negative tests are less than 15 days old.

Then, out on the pool terrace of the day’s set — a music producer’s hilltop home with a view of the Hollywood sign — they yank down their pants and stand around joking as Mr. Cobi quickly inspects their mouths, hands and genitals for sores.

“I’m not a doctor,” Mr. Cobi, who wears a pleasantly sheepish grin, says. “I’m only qualified to do this because I’ve been shooting porn since 1990 and I know what looks bad.”

Bizarre as the ritual is, it seems to work.

The industry’s medical consultants say that about 350,000 sex scenes have been shot without condoms since 2004, and H.I.V. has not been transmitted on a set once.

Outside the world of pornography, the industry’s testing regimen is not well known, and no serious academic study of it has ever been done. But when it was described to several AIDS experts, they all reacted by saying that there were far fewer infections than they would have expected, given how much high-risk sex takes place.

“I don’t think there’s any question that it works,” said Dr. Allan Ronald, a Canadian AIDS specialist who did landmark studies of the virus in prostitutes in a Nairobi slum. “I’m a little uncomfortable, because it’s giving the wrong message — that you can have multiple sex partners without condoms — but I can’t say it doesn’t work.”

Despite the regimen’s apparent success, California health officials and an advocacy group, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, are trying to make it illegal to shoot without condoms. They argue that other sexually transmitted diseases are rampant in the industry, though the industry trade group disputes that.

In January, the city of Los Angeles passed a law requiring actors to wear condoms. A measure to do the same for the whole county is on the ballot on Tuesday.

Producers say the condom requirement will drive them out of business since consumers will not buy such films. Local newspapers like The Los Angeles Times oppose the ballot measure, calling it well-intentioned but unenforceable, and warning that it could drive up to 10,000 jobs out of state.

Very frequent testing makes it almost impossible for an actor to stay infected without being caught, said Dr. Jacques Pepin, the author of “The Origins of AIDS” and an expert on transmission rates. “And if you are having sex mostly with people who themselves are tested all the time, this must further reduce the risk.”

When the virus first enters a high-risk group like heroin users, urban prostitutes or habitués of gay bathhouses, it usually infects 30 to 60 percent of the cohort within a few years, studies have shown. The same would be expected in pornography, performers can have more than a dozen partners a month, but the industry says self-policing has prevented it..

“Our talent base has sex exponentially more than other people, but we’re all on the same page about keeping it out,” said Steven Hirsch, the founder of Vivid Entertainment, one of the biggest studios.

Performers have to test negative every 28 days, although some studios recently switched to every 14.

If a test is positive, all the studios across the country that adhere to standards set by the Free Speech Coalition, an industry trade group, are obliged to stop filming until all the on-screen partners of that performer, all their partners, and all their partners’ partners, are found and retested. In 2004, the industry shut down for three months to do that.

It has had briefer shutdowns in each of the last four years.

In 2009 and 2010, no other infected performers were found. Coalition representatives said an infected woman in 2009, from Nevada, may have had an infected boyfriend, and offered evidence that a man infected in 2010 in Florida had worked outside the industry as a prostitute. The 2011 test was a false positive.

A shutdown in August came after several actors got syphilis, not H.I.V. All performers were given a choice: Take antibiotics, or pass two back-to-back syphilis tests 14 days apart.

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Silicon Valley Objects to Online Privacy Rule Proposals for Children

Washington is pushing Silicon Valley on children’s privacy, and Silicon Valley is pushing back.

Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter have all objected to portions of a federal effort to strengthen online privacy protections for children. In addition, media giants like Viacom and Disney, cable operators, marketing associations, technology groups and a trade group representing toy makers are arguing that the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed rule changes seem so onerous that, rather than enhance online protections for children, they threaten to deter companies from offering children’s Web sites and services altogether.

“If adopted, the effect of these new rules would be to slow the deployment of applications that provide tremendous benefits to children, and to slow the economic growth and job creation generated by the app economy,” Catherine A. Novelli, vice president of worldwide government affairs at Apple, wrote in comments to the agency.

But the underlying concern, for both the industry and regulators, is not so much about online products for children themselves. It is about the data collection and data mining mechanisms that facilitate digital marketing on apps and Web sites for children — and a debate over whether these practices could put children at greater risk.

In 1998, Congress passed the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act in an effort to give parents control over the collection and dissemination of private information about their children online. The regulation, known as Coppa, requires Web site operators to obtain a parent’s consent before collecting personal details, like home addresses or e-mail addresses, from children under 13.

Now, federal regulators are preparing to update that rule, arguing that it has not kept pace with advances like online behavioral advertising, a practice that uses data mining to tailor ads to people’s online behavior. The F.T.C. wants to expand the types of data whose collection requires prior parental permission to include persistent ID systems, like unique device codes or customer code numbers stored in cookies, if those codes are used to track children online for advertising purposes.

The idea is to preclude companies from compiling dossiers on the online activities — and by extension the health, socioeconomic status, race or romantic concerns — of individual children across the Web over time.

“What children post online or search as part of their homework should not haunt them as they apply to colleges or for jobs,” Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and co-chairman of the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, said in a recent phone interview. “YouTube should not be turned into YouTracked.”

The agency’s proposals have provoked an intense reaction from some major online operators, television networks, social networks, app platforms and advertising trade groups. Some argue that the F.T.C. has overstepped its mandate in proposing to greatly expand the rule’s scope.

Others say that using ID systems like customer code numbers to track children “anonymously” online is benign — and that collecting information about children’s online activities is necessary to deliver the ads that finance free content and services for children.

“What is the harm we are trying to prevent here?” said Alan L. Friel, chairman of the media and technology practice at the law firm Edwards Wildman Palmer. “We risk losing a lot of the really good educational and entertaining content if we make things too difficult for people to operate the sites or generate revenue from the sites.”

The economic issue at stake is much bigger than just the narrow children’s audience. If the F.T.C. were to include customer code numbers among the information that requires a parent’s consent, industry analysts say, it might someday require companies to get similar consent for a practice that represents the backbone of digital marketing and advertising — using such code numbers to track the online activities of adults.

“Once you’ve said it’s personal information for children that requires consent, you’ve set the framework for a requirement of consent to be applied to another population,” Mr. Friel said. “If it is personal information for someone that’s 12, it doesn’t cease being personal information when they are 13.”

Indeed, many of the F.T.C.’s proposed rule revisions have vocal detractors.

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Candidates Make Final Dash as Race Winds Down

Doug Mills/The New York Times

Former President Bill Clinton appeared with President Barack Obama at a campaign event in Concord, N.H., on Sunday.

WASHINGTON — President Obama and Mitt Romney entered the final 48 hours of campaigning on Sunday with bravado tinged with urgent warnings to their supporters that the hard-fought race for the White House remained razor close.

The rivals started the day with rallies in the two competitive states where the presidential campaigns begin every four years and where the fates of their political futures could be decided this year at the last minute: Iowa and New Hampshire.

Joined by former President Bill Clinton in the shadow of the New Hampshire State House in Concord, Mr. Obama vowed to continue his efforts to improve a recovering economy and expressed the confidence of an incumbent that voters in the battleground states would give him the chance to try.

But he also betrayed the nervousness of a first-term president whose hopes for another four years — and the opportunity to continue shaping his legacy — hinges on a half-dozen states that could go either way on Tuesday.

“I am not ready to give up the fight, and I hope you aren’t, either, New Hampshire,” Mr. Obama said at a rally that attracted thousands of people, his voice already growing hoarse at the start of a long day of campaigning. “We have come too far to turn back now. We have come too far to let our hearts grow faint.”

“We will win New Hampshire,” he concluded. “We will win this election. We will finish what we started. We will renew those bonds that do not break.”

Mr. Romney spoke moments earlier in Des Moines, also expressing the certainty of success and telling about 4,400 supporters that the clock had nearly run out on the president’s time in office. He promised a new era of economic hope for families who are struggling.

“Instead of building bridges, he’s made the divide between our parties wider,” Mr. Romney said. “Let me tell you why it is he’s fallen so far short of what he’s promised: it’s because he cared more about a liberal agenda than he did about repairing the economy.”

Mr. Romney is racing from swing state to swing state with the intensity of a candidate who recognizes that he is trailing in the polls — if only slightly — behind Mr. Obama in many of the states he must win to accumulate the 270 electoral votes he needs to become president.

“We thank you; we ask you to stay with it. All the way, all the way to our victory on Tuesday night,” Mr. Romney told the crowd, urging it to work hard in the last hours. “It’s possible that you may have some friends or maybe even family members who haven’t made up their mind yet who to vote for.”

The two candidates have scheduled a flurry of rallies in the next two days to drum up the kind of enthusiasm that they hope will be evident at polling places on Tuesday.

Mr. Obama drew a crowd estimated at 14,000 people who gathered for an outdoor rally below the gleaming dome of New Hampshire’s capitol. It was bright and chilly, recalling any number of days that he and other candidates had walked the streets of Concord to win the nation’s first primary every four years.

Not far from where Mr. Obama spoke was a reminder of how New Hampshire almost dashed his dreams in 2008. On a line of granite stones in front of the State Library are chiseled the names of the winners of past primaries, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose victory in 2008 halted, for a time, Mr. Obama’s surge after he had won the Iowa caucuses.

The president was to move on to Florida and Ohio on Sunday before making final stops in Wisconsin, Ohio and Iowa on Monday. Mr. Obama is expected to head home to Chicago on Tuesday to watch returns from his campaign headquarters.

Mr. Romney’s schedule on Monday resembles the president’s as he heads to the handful of states that could determine the results on Tuesday. Mr. Romney plans events in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and New Hampshire on Monday after visiting Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia on Sunday.

Mark Landler contributed reporting from Concord, N.H., and Ashley Parker from Des Moines.

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Google's Android software in 3 out of 4 smartphones

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Lucas plans 'little personal films' in future

NEW YORK (AP) — George Lucas is done with "Star Wars," but not with filmmaking.

The "Star Wars" creator says he's looking forward to making his "own little personal films" that he doubts will be for the theater crowd.

Lucas spoke Friday night at Ebony magazine's Power 100 Gala, days after announcing the sale of his storied Lucasfilm to Disney for $4.05 billion. The deal would allow for more "Star Wars" films.

Lucas was "very sad" let Lucasfilm go but excited about his educational foundation, which will benefit from the sale. He also plans to make more movies. His last one was this year's "Red Tails," about the Tuskegee Airmen, but he said he barely got it in theaters. He said the movies he's working on now "will never get into theaters."

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Well: The Mental Fallout of the Hurricane

In the small Connecticut town where I grew up, the tornado of 1979 remains the storm, a freak tornado packing 86-mile-per-hour winds that churned through the streets, killing three people, injuring hundreds and destroying several hundred homes and businesses, including many in my neighborhood.

I was 15 at the time, at home alone looking after my 10-year-old sister and 5-year-old brother. For months afterward, like others caught in the surprise storm, we struggled with memories of that afternoon. During the first few days, I kept reliving the moments huddled with my siblings in the corner; later, I had recurring nightmares and became paralyzed with fear whenever I heard a clap of thunder.

Even today, I tend to worry more than most whenever the sky looks odd or when the weather suddenly turns muggy and dark, the slightest hint of what my sister and I have come to call “tornado weather.”

For almost three decades now, health care experts have been studying the psychological effects of natural disasters and have found that disasters as varied as the 1994 earthquake in Northridge, Calif., and Hurricanes Katrina (2005), Andrew (1992) and Hugo (1989) left significant, disabling and lasting psychological scars in their wake. While individuals with pre-existing mental health issues were at particular risk, everyone was vulnerable. In New Orleans a month after Hurricane Katrina, for example, 17 percent of residents reported symptoms consistent with serious mental illness, compared with 10 percent of those who lived in surrounding areas and only 1 to 3 percent in the general population.

Most commonly and most immediately, the survivors suffered post-traumatic stress symptoms like recurrent nightmares, flashbacks, a hair-trigger temper and an emotional “numbing,” much of which could be considered normal in the first couple of months after a disaster. “It’s a pretty natural thing to have nightmares after living through a natural disaster,” said Ronald C. Kessler, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School who has studied the effect of natural disasters on the mental health of survivors. “It would almost be abnormal if you didn’t.”

Over time, when those symptoms abated, survivors were able to move on. When they didn’t, or when other mood disorders like anxiety and depression appeared, mental health issues quickly became a leading cause of disability for survivors, further hampering other efforts at recovery.

But the research has also revealed that we can mitigate the psychological fallout, even after the disaster has occurred. Studies from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have shown that what communities, governments and even elected officials do in the weeks, months and years that follow can have a significant effect on how individuals fare psychologically.

For example, among Hurricane Katrina survivors, there were striking differences in the rates of mental health disorders, depending on how people felt about the difficulties they had finding food and shelter. Survivors who continued to face such adversity because of the government’s slow response had significantly higher rates of mental health problems.

“There’s no question that the best thing the federal, state and municipal governments can do to protect against psychopathology in these kinds of situations is to restore the day-to-day functioning that keeps everyone healthy,” said Dr. Sandro Galea, lead author of the study and chairman of epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

For now, experts are predicting that the psychological fallout from Hurricane Sandy will be less severe than that from Hurricane Katrina. But their optimistic predictions rest in part on the response thus far of government officials and the larger community.

“People pull together at times like this,” Dr. Kessler noted. “To the extent that those affected by Sandy can build on this sense of community and get back to normal, it could be an opportunity for people to grow and even develop a sense of accomplishment because of what they’ve been through.”

What I remember today as clearly as the blinding whiteness of the tornado winds that enveloped our house and the terror that gripped my siblings and me back in 1979 are the state and local officials and rescue workers who appeared almost immediately, the churches and community organizations that organized shelters and fund-raisers, and the neighbors, sleeves rolled up, who cleared debris and cooked for one another.

When the new homes finally began to emerge from the rubble the following spring, it wasn’t the cookie-cutter skyline of raised ranches and colonials that was restored. Instead, the neighborhood became a showplace of modest but quirky family abodes — a brown, modern geometric house on one corner, a yellow, partly subterranean one a few doors down.

From a devastating storm, my neighbors had managed to build new dreams.

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A Storm-Battered Supply Chain Threatens Holiday Shopping

The economic effects of Hurricane Sandy are reverberating beyond areas hit by the storm as businesses warn customers of delays, try to get merchandise out of closed ports and face canceled orders.

In addition to shutting down shipping terminals and submerging warehouses, the storm also tangled up deliveries because of downed power lines, closed roads and scarce gasoline in parts of New York and New Jersey.

The supply chain is backing up at a crucial time, just as retailers normally bring their final shipments into stores for the holiday shopping season, which retailers depend on for annual profitability.

“Things are slowing down,” said Chris Merritt, vice president for retail supply chain solutions at the trucking company Ryder. “This whole part of the supply chain is clogged up.”

FedEx, for example, has rented fuel tankers to supply its delivery trucks as commercial gas stations run dry. Ryder has been hunting down rental trucks to add capacity. CSX, the major railroad company, was continuing to advise customers to expect delays of at least 72 hours on shipments. And retailers ranging from Amazon to Diane von Furstenberg have told customers to expect delays on shipments.

Many economists expect the storm to shave up to half a percentage point from growth in the fourth quarter. That is a big reduction, with growth estimated to reach an annual rate of 1 to 2 percent before the storm, and the economy facing other significant headwinds, including fiscal uncertainty in Washington.

While economic losses from the storm are expected to be significantly lower than those from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, this storm’s impact has been intensified because the Northeast is densely populated.

The region is responsible for about $3 trillion in output, or roughly 20 percent of the country’s total gross domestic product, said Gregory Daco, a senior economist with IHS Global Insight. “Part of what was lost will be delayed, but part is lost forever,” Mr. Daco said.

Last week, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey reported that all of its major marine terminals were closed by the storm. While parts of the system have started to reopen, delays persist. The New York area’s port system is the largest on the East Coast, and the third largest in the nation. Last year, it handled $208 billion in cargo.

As a result of the closings, delays may ripple through the holiday season, according to Paul Tsui, chairman of the Hong Kong Association of Freight Forwarding and Logistics. As of Sunday, almost all rail service from the ports was suspended, terminals were damaged and much of the ports’ equipment was being reviewed to see if it still worked.

Several customers with facilities in the New York area told him “their warehouses are totally damaged, and presume the merchandise inside will have to be reported lost to insurance companies,” Mr. Tsui said.

“We are now coming into the cutoff for seasonal orders for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays,” he added, and companies that missed shipment deadlines must either send products by expensive air freight, pay a penalty to retailers for late shipments or face canceled orders.

Mr. Merritt of Ryder said he expected that some items that have already been advertised for sales on the day after Thanksgiving — traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year — would not get to stores in time.

The delays are hitting smaller merchants like Robert Van Sickle particularly hard.

His pet supply company, Polka Dog Bakery, was relying on a shipment of cardboard tubes from China with a merry design, intended to hold popular holiday dog treats. The products represent about 15 percent of sales at the company. But the New York Container Terminal in Staten Island, where the tubes arrived shortly before the storm, was devastated, and Mr. Van Sickle’s freight forwarder has been unable to track down the containers.

It is too late to reorder the tubes from China in time for the holidays, and Mr. Van Sickle has tens of thousands of baked dog treats piled up at his Boston headquarters. Insurance will cover the cost of the cardboard tubes, but not the finished products, and those payments will not come close to making up for lost revenue.

Last week, he was forced to call customers like L.L. Bean and tell them he probably could not fulfill their orders. “Without this product, we’re in trouble,” Mr. Van Sickle said. “I am a business owner and this is pretty much my year.”

In Cape May, N.J., Rich Layton’s six-week-old start-up, Layton Sports Cards, was supposed to be shipping sports card orders all week. But his apartment partially flooded, his Allentown distributor could not find clear roads to get to him, and U.P.S. held his other deliveries during the storm.

“It’s thousands of dollars worth of cards that people were already paying for,” Mr. Layton said.

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