Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

Time	Event
2:07p	UR DOIN IT WRNG UR DOIN IT WRNG (Yes, real photo, Seattle Times. Fixed now.) Current Mood: silly (1 Comment | Comment on this)
2:58p	Today's Reading List Courtesy Brad Setser at RGE Monitor, here's a short and eminently readable paper on the credit crisis (PDF file) by Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart of Harvard University and the University of Maryland, respectively. It does rather persuasively display that the model best describing the current situation is a deflationary model. Brad's excerpts and discussion are also worth reading. Glenn Greenwald's five or six most recent posts continue his disassembly of the role of the useless fawners otherwise known as a political press corps. Just below those, he's culled out a few examples of the racist language already being bandied about a bit against Senator Obama, in preparation for the possibility that he wins the Democratic nomination. One of the things that has angered me so much about the GOP's hard swing not just to fundamentalism but authoritarianism of all sorts is that they've made all sorts of paranoid lefty conspiracy no-longer-bullshit theories actually come true - turning the US into a surveillance-and-torture state, just for example. But that apparently wasn't good enough; they've also had to go validate the fucking tinhat crowd. Dear readers, I introduce the Plunge Protection Team, now pretty much official, tho' not by that name. Thanks, guys - now the whole world is your crappy conspiracy thriller novel, and I hate you for it. Talking of hate, only the serious kind, the group that Holocaust-revisionist Scott Lively and Kirkland fundamentalist leader Ken Hutcherson helped get established in the US from Latvia and Russia, "Watchmen on the Walls," gets a short writeup in the Christian Science Monitor, related to a murder trial in California. They sadly downplay the revisionism, and don't note Mr. Lively's latest book, which accuses queers of being a secret force behind nearly every evil in the history of civilisation - a Protocols of the Elders of Queerdom, more or less. Meanwhile, on a related topic, dogemperor has some juicy quotes from Faith and Freedom Network's Joe Fuiten, wherein Rev. Fuiten claims that the United States has always been a fundamentalist religious state (tho' not in those exact words, of course), and calls people supporting secular government "illegal aliens." And you know how they feel about those. dogemperor's post here also has a variety of other material worth reading. (I suppose those two entries make this as close to a Cultural Warfare Update as I've done in a while, doesn't it? I guess I can throw this entry that tag, too.) Finally, here's a good bit of rant about the political frustrations felt by many. Current Mood: busy (Comment on this)
8:42p	Please give me another explanation for this. Polling in the last few days before the primary as well as exit polling showed Senator Obama winning the New Hampshire primary over Senator Clinton. Exit polling also showed Senator Edwards in a solid third place. Senator Edwards's finish statewide matched the polling. Senator Clinton and Obama's didn't. Various theories have been floated as to why. Andrew Sullivan pointed to this analysis, which provides an extremely disturbing data point. In New Hampshire, some precincts are hand-counted. The others are Diebold machines. In the hand-counted precints, Senator Obama's and Senator Clinton's counts matched the exit and pre-primary voting, with Senator Obama winning strongly. In the Diebold-counted precincts. Senator Clinton won by significant numbers. Please give me another explanation for this discrepancy. Please. Because this is a disaster. If it's Clinton's machine doing it, it's desperately stupid to have done so so sloppily - even if they trust the useless, fawning media not to talk about it. But frankly, I think it's too obvious and accordingly too stupid. On the other hand, if it's the GOP's - and if they've covered their tracks too well for it to be tracked back to them - it's a master stroke, setting up the Democratic party for internal war. In either case, if true, it destroys whatever confidence might have been remaining in the American elections system. I have said many, many times that Diebold machines are trivially hackable fraudboxes that need to be banned. They need to be gone. This has to happen. Now. ETA1: Petition to that effect here. It's not enough. But it's a start. ETA2: At least one other report (see comments) says that the exit polling was within margin of error of final results. This does not match what I saw beforehand and the morning of the primary, but I didn't pay attention throughout. It also does not match what I read in coverage afterwards, but without the actual raw data in front of me... ETA3: Here's the breakdown of the spread: GOP, which shows a strong machine-count gain for Mitt Romney, and Democratic, which shows a strong machine-count gain for Hillary Clinton at specifically the expense of Barak Obama, primarily in small and medium-sized towns, which are broken out. Also, see my comments here. ETA4: Regarding to the media report mentioned below (and above, in ETA2); the report does not actually claim that the exit polling matched the machine counts. It notes that there were large numbers of undecideds and unsures going in to the election, and that Obama got his pre-election polling percentage, and that therefore the result is reasonable. It doesn't really address exit polling discrepancies at all. It further states a few key facts: 1) Exit polls said undecideds were split between Obama and Clinton. However, 2) as noted above, Obama got his pre-election polling numbers - almost exactly. (Also, Edwards also got his pre-polling numbers, iirc. This is not mentioned in the report, and I could be remembering wrong). This implies that all undecideds went to Clinton, and either lied about it to exit pollsters or undecideds switching to Obama exactly balanced out Obama's losses of support shown in earlier polls. Current Mood: horrified (19 Comments | Comment on this)

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