Chain links
Feb. 17th, 2005 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumFirst up,Digby The Company One Keeps points out an interesting, and to me telling, difference between the public face of the Republican Party, the attitudes of those who are the movers and shapers.
Which he follows with comments on what taht means in terms of strategyWe need to give them wedgies
Digby also has some commentary on the Guckertt/Gannon/Manchurian Beefcake story Sex, and scandal, "Paraphrasing a comment I read somewhere yesterday (apologies to the author) "pay no attention to the naked gay conservative male prostitute sitting in the middle of the family values white house living room." Goldberg affects a jocular dismissiveness for a reason. He knows what a real story is and he knows how they work. And he is trivializing this one because it is actually quite dangerous." and I have to admit, he makes some telling points about what it could mean, if we were willing to use it to give them the aforementions wedgies. I guess some of my comments are going to change when the Guckert/Gannon story comes up; sex and scandals.
Leaving Digby behind we turn to Orcinus Spreading the Virus and the Washington Times.
Now, it probably isn't much of a surprise that I don't care for (and barring follow up on things like this, won't read) Rev. Moons propaganda rag. How it slants the news is bad enough, but what passes for op-ed is sickening. Orcinus is discussing the paper's claims that immigrants are bearing disease, and we risk lethal epidemics.
That would be bad enough, but the Washington Times being the Faux News of the print medium means that people like Michelle Malkin pick up the theme, which isn't new, and is no less false for the psuedo-science being used to promulgate it today.
Lost, perhaps, in all the blather on SS, and the The Manchurian Beefcake are some more pressing issues (hard to believe there are issues more pressing than SS, but that is big ticket, there are some quiet things being done to change the playing field).
The President is once again re-nominating judges the Senate has rejected. No more mister nice blog tells us that not only is Janice Brown being tossed in the ring again, she may not believe the Constituion doesn't prevent a state from establishing a religion, then again, she might not believe any of the rest of the Bill of Rights are more than federal restrictions. In a 1999 speech at Pepperdine University titled "Beyond the Abyss: Restoring Religion on the Public Square," Brown disputed the doctrine of separation of church and state and questioned whether the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, applied to the states....
That would apply to things like the Second, and the Fourth, and Fifth (ponder that, not only would a state be allowed to search without a warrant, it could compell you to testify against yourself, after; of course, it made it illegal for anyone, other than cops, to have a gun).
You'd think the right would be against that, but nope. They are pondering the use of the "nuclear" option (whereby filibusters would be, effectively, dead, and the Republicans in the Senate would be able to get anything they wanted passed out of it), to get her to the bench.
This idea, that the Bill of Right only applies to the federal government isn't new. Dispatches from the Culture Wars has a run down of some of the present arguments being made in that regard. Included are some topical references to people who had strong feelings on the matter, at the time the constitution was adopted; for a little context.
Which ties into this. It's evil, 'nuff said.
I'm not sure quite what to make of this Exit polls were right. I say I don't know what to make of it, because I 1: don't want to believe it 2: can, 3: the report they are talking about follows the pattern predicted for shaving the points, as well as my irony meter still recovering from Bush calling on Ukraine to recount/revote because the exit polls and the tallies didn't match.
Finally, for those who are still paying any attention to the Ward Churchill nonsense, Eric Muller Is that Legal points out that Thomas Woods (Lincoln freed nobody) is using his tenured position to teach false history, as well as all sorts of things Mr. Muller was linking to, about his recent writings on secession, which no longer work.
Which he follows with comments on what taht means in terms of strategyWe need to give them wedgies
Digby also has some commentary on the Guckertt/Gannon/Manchurian Beefcake story Sex, and scandal, "Paraphrasing a comment I read somewhere yesterday (apologies to the author) "pay no attention to the naked gay conservative male prostitute sitting in the middle of the family values white house living room." Goldberg affects a jocular dismissiveness for a reason. He knows what a real story is and he knows how they work. And he is trivializing this one because it is actually quite dangerous." and I have to admit, he makes some telling points about what it could mean, if we were willing to use it to give them the aforementions wedgies. I guess some of my comments are going to change when the Guckert/Gannon story comes up; sex and scandals.
Leaving Digby behind we turn to Orcinus Spreading the Virus and the Washington Times.
Now, it probably isn't much of a surprise that I don't care for (and barring follow up on things like this, won't read) Rev. Moons propaganda rag. How it slants the news is bad enough, but what passes for op-ed is sickening. Orcinus is discussing the paper's claims that immigrants are bearing disease, and we risk lethal epidemics.
That would be bad enough, but the Washington Times being the Faux News of the print medium means that people like Michelle Malkin pick up the theme, which isn't new, and is no less false for the psuedo-science being used to promulgate it today.
Lost, perhaps, in all the blather on SS, and the The Manchurian Beefcake are some more pressing issues (hard to believe there are issues more pressing than SS, but that is big ticket, there are some quiet things being done to change the playing field).
The President is once again re-nominating judges the Senate has rejected. No more mister nice blog tells us that not only is Janice Brown being tossed in the ring again, she may not believe the Constituion doesn't prevent a state from establishing a religion, then again, she might not believe any of the rest of the Bill of Rights are more than federal restrictions. In a 1999 speech at Pepperdine University titled "Beyond the Abyss: Restoring Religion on the Public Square," Brown disputed the doctrine of separation of church and state and questioned whether the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, applied to the states....
That would apply to things like the Second, and the Fourth, and Fifth (ponder that, not only would a state be allowed to search without a warrant, it could compell you to testify against yourself, after; of course, it made it illegal for anyone, other than cops, to have a gun).
You'd think the right would be against that, but nope. They are pondering the use of the "nuclear" option (whereby filibusters would be, effectively, dead, and the Republicans in the Senate would be able to get anything they wanted passed out of it), to get her to the bench.
This idea, that the Bill of Right only applies to the federal government isn't new. Dispatches from the Culture Wars has a run down of some of the present arguments being made in that regard. Included are some topical references to people who had strong feelings on the matter, at the time the constitution was adopted; for a little context.
Which ties into this. It's evil, 'nuff said.
I'm not sure quite what to make of this Exit polls were right. I say I don't know what to make of it, because I 1: don't want to believe it 2: can, 3: the report they are talking about follows the pattern predicted for shaving the points, as well as my irony meter still recovering from Bush calling on Ukraine to recount/revote because the exit polls and the tallies didn't match.
Finally, for those who are still paying any attention to the Ward Churchill nonsense, Eric Muller Is that Legal points out that Thomas Woods (Lincoln freed nobody) is using his tenured position to teach false history, as well as all sorts of things Mr. Muller was linking to, about his recent writings on secession, which no longer work.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-02-18 02:03 am (UTC)The people who conducted it totally disagree with their conclusions. your authors up there just refuse to believe the drawbacks of exit polling:
1. They are done for the most part in primarily urban areas for no sin uglier than simple logistics. We all know how cities tend to vote...
2. There are more polls done in 'swing' states than in others - and the urban area's of swing states, which are primarily demoncratic anyhow, further biasing the results.
3. Exit polls are done early, so that results are available faster. Based on the area, that can further hamper accuracy.
4. The reported 'Kerry landslide!' may well have lit fires under CST & PST bush voters, and so well comforted sme 'kerry voters' nation wide, they didn't bother voting...
I lost oogles of respect(and there wasn't much anyway) for the right over how they acted with clinton - just barely mitigated when he lied under oath(DUDE! WTF?!).
The longer the left clings to the 'we wuz robbed! again!' stuff, the harder it makes it for me to want to join them again. And they need centrist like me in their ranks if they are going to steal voters from the right next time.;-)
If it's any consolation, they never intended that we should really self-rule
Date: 2005-02-18 02:05 am (UTC)I'm watching a poll get fixed right now, btw, on a very small scale, and mostly detectable. There's no monetary prize, no reward for winning in any category, nothing but vanity in a tiny fishpond, like winning the spelling bee at your junior high school. Yet people cheat, and put hours into filling out multiple forms, and cheat *stupidly* so that it is pretty easy for us to identify most of them (because they all come in the same envelope, with the same handwriting, frex.)But it's *that* important to some people to "win" the title of, say, Best Salad Bar in the city & environs, and be elevated above their neighbors for this. It's like fandom that way. (This is different from the legitimate GOTV effots which we also see, and are perfectly legit by the rules.)
But then again, with so few ballots, it's fairly easy to detect anomalies. That's why I studied my state so intensively and kept such close observations, and pointed out that where records are kept so exhaustively, and people are so tenacious - both in winning, and in dissenting - and where you have such extremely good odds of meeting someone you know, or related to someone you know, anywhere you go within a hundred miles - does not apply to any area with different demographics and customs. Until this administration, I had no idea that poor people were routinely kept from voting by broken machines, or that ballots were deliberately designed to make it hard for people to vote, and this was done with a dare-you-to-do-something-about-it-suckah defiance - in places that, traditionally, had kept the "unfit" from voting by other means in the past, and just adjusted to keep up with the times and new laws.
It wouldn't ever have *occurred* to me, that they were doing it, and getting away with it, forty years after Selma, because I have no experience of living, as opposed to visiting, large urban metropolises north *or* south. Fucking with the voter rolls in my state can cost you your own right to vote. Strangers from VA had to show our GOP how to cheat with KITV in 2002. If it weren't for the internet, I would never have realized fully how different my voting experience was from most other marginal Americans in cities' around the country - or the chronic history of this that didn't go away with segregation.
Ever since the only-property-owners-should-have-the-vote meme started to openly be espoused among patriotic theocons (they think they're patriotic at least, wrapping bible in flag) in my presence in the late 80s/early 90s, and in conservative magazines, my awareness that the Right uses "democracy" and "the republic" as opiates for the people was activated, though it took more data to come into focus...
John Negroponte has now been offered the post of head of the Secret Police. John Negroponte! Thus are we punished for our apathy, two and three decades past.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-18 04:08 pm (UTC)The report flatly states that there were gross anomalies in the variace between the predicted margin for error, and the outome. How vast (and vast is the word) is hard to explain without some arcane-seeming math, but to be several deviations away from the mean (which is what going from 1 percent to 5 percent is) would be about the same as a cop clocking you at 95 in a 25 zone. You might have been doing 40, but no way you were doing 95.
When the locations of the discrepancies shows the pattern of increase predicted by more than one model of vote fraud (from separate sources, including the mathemeticians who first pointed out the vulnerabilties of the electric machines to tampering) things look worse.
I said I had mixed feelings about this. I don't want to think this sort of thing can happen here. I'm not going to stick my head in the sand and say, however, that it's flat out impossible. Because if it is happening, even on a small scale, that is, or damned well ought to be, terrifying.
As for Clinton's lies, it's another topic, and not relevant to this at all.
TK