Is Sullivan Round the Bend? /Tainted Polling

Am I the only one starting to wonder about this guy?

Sorry, gang, but the more I read him, the more I’ve got to wonder if it all isn’t just getting to be a bit much for Sullivan. He’s on one of his NPR/Begging for dollars broadcasting kicks again, begging donations, for what is, or at least, was, arguably one of the more commercially viable sites on the planet.

I’ve come to the point where I admit to paying less and less attention to him, perhaps hitting his site every third day.

As I’ve suggested previously, his own internal conflicts are causing logic failures. Sad to see, frankly.

While I’m on the subject of Sullivan, the case, I think that broke my trust of the man, was this one.

I caught a wrap on that story from WIRED today, though I don’t have the URL handy; system crashed in the process of reading it in… some kind of script error, I think.

Anyway, wired is reporting that they’ve nullified the polling they did on the question of Homosexuals and their supposed “right to marry “, becuse the test had been tampered with.

I said at the time:

“The Homosexual groups have been watching places like this for a long while, waiting for an originzed attack on such things. They have a history… a LONG history of doing so. This is merely one more example of such. And Sullivan, being generally a smart guy, knows this. Here it is; I can think of no other path, than Sullivan passing off a lie as an indication of massive support for homosexual ‘marriage’. It’s called self-justification in the face of overhwhelming opposition. Why has every other properly controlled poll ever taken on the matter, shown a massive support for blockage of homosexual ‘marriage’? “

Which of course is exactly what happened.
(read the link)

Out of curiousity about a week after I posted that, I decided to look at the site,and cast a vote myself.  What do you know; both my usual mailing addresses had already voted, despite the fact I’d never been to the site before.  You can imagine, I was curious about that, so, I read the fine print, and it turns out that the AFA wrote the page to make sure the mailing address existed, but other than a ping, never bothered to confirm that the addressee was the one actually casting the vote. as such it would have been rather simple to pick my two mailing addresses off, say, USENET, or the web, for that matter, and use them. To test this theory, I went back in with an addres I keep in reserve and that nobody but myself knows about, and bingo, the vote went in.

So, clearly, the vote was tampered with by people trying to swing the public’s perception of reality, and AFA was justified in removing the poll; it was tainted.

Alas, that won’t stop the Sullivans of the world from trying to claim their false victory, in spite of all logic.

Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough in the Washoington Times this morning:

” A senior Defense Department official tells us one of the alarming after-action intelligence reports that reached the Pentagon is that the communist government of Cuba shared intelligence on the United States with Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The intelligence ties are believed to be an offshoot of Cuba’s covert oil-purchasing arrangement with Iraq under Saddam. Those deals have been under way since the late 1990s and involve oil tankers that were sent to Mexico. The oil then was pumped from the tankers to smaller boats for delivery to Cuba. “

That’s an interesting and potentially dangerous dynamic to all of this. I can see why the left is annoyed Saddam is gone.

No, I couldn’t bring myself to watch the thing. Trying to convince myself these people (?) are American and sane doesn’t work and only serves to make my butt hurt.  I’ll skim the text files when they show up in the morning.

Why? Simple.

Remember the line I posted from Drezner’s earlier this week:

“Don’t be surprised by volitility among the candidates. The number one criteria of a sizable number of Democrats (myself included) is who can win in November. All other considerations are secondary. Who has the best health care plan? Who has the best economic stimulus plan? Who has the best whatever? Who Cares! The important thing is to win.”

If it doesn’t matter, why have a debate?

One of the things I’ve been looking at is my page stats, because I’m looking at putting these pages on a commercial site. I’m trying to calculate bandwidth needed. I’ve been noting a lot of bloggers using SITEMETER, and since it’s free, I thought I’d give it a try. The code’s been included today, and will start spitting useful numbers in a week or two.

The Washington Shaft is finally getting around to the conclusion I’ve been saying here for years, now:

“The last recession may have started in the last months of the Clinton administration rather than at the beginning of the Bush administration”

May have?

Idiots.

A few days ago, I made reference to the idea that the states were no longer in the financial problems that they once were.
HobbsOnline has the details of one of those states… Tennesee, which at the moment comes out around $170m.

Funny how you never hear the news people talking about this.

Anyone who doesn’t understand that Dr. King’s call for racial equality is being twisted, need look no further than the reaction of the idiots running WestSide High in Omaha, as depicted at Omaha.com:

“A small group of Westside High School students plastered the school Monday with posters advocating that a student from South Africa receive the ‘Distinguished African American Student Award’ next year.

The posters were removed by administrators because they were ‘inappropriate and insensitive,’ Westside spokeswoman Peggy Rupprecht said Tuesday.  “

The problem?

The students were suggesting a WHITE African student get the award, and apparently went to some lengths to describe this student’s merits, of which there were many.

Apparently, the Omaha kids making this suggestion were more grown up then the ones running the government school, there.  Dare I say they were racist?

As an owner of about 25,000 LP’s and a similar number of 45’s, along with all the digital stuff (MP3’s and CD’s), you can imagine this one tweaked my interest a bit.

ELP Laser Turntable: plays vinyl records without a needle

A Laser? For vinyl? Hmmm.
But there’s more; The sales thingie says:

“The LT’s beam of light can read the record’s groove in places that a conventional stylus cannot. This means that the LT performs high quality sound reproduction even on vinyl that has been worn by a needle. The Laser can also read below the depth of surface scratches, which improves playback.”

Now the turntable itself is a belt-driver, with wow/flutter rated at .07%, which, alas, is audible to me. More, one has to wonder a bit at the >55db weighted noise level which is nigh on 20db worse than a CD.  I also wonder what kind of rumble is induced by the table… and how the pickup reacts to it. I mean, other than the S/N ratio, the real trick of digital recording was to eliminate the influences of the room and the equipment. Sounds like they haven’t quite gotten that one down, yet, but certainly the technology holds that promise if they ever develop it. I can see, for example, a record being laser swept, even without playing it in real time, and processed to eliminate noise… that audio run through a D/A converter and streamed. Hey, looks to me like it could be done.

Now, the initial $11,000US price tag, plus the $400 shipping may be an issue….. but you know how those prices tend to fall once the technology catches on and grows. Consider, for example that $39 DVD player you saw at the store last week.

Here’s hoping.

I’m thinking it was partially the problem. Bootrz points out today:

“By the way … has anyone bothered to ask what this all means for Al Gore?  Al throws his support behind Dean, and it’s a sleigh ride to poll hell from there.  Who would want the endorsement from a man who couldn’t carry his home state in a presidential election anyway?”

The boy’s got a point. It can’t be denied that once Gore and for that matter Harkin stood up with him, that Dean started down the long slide. 

And, speaking of Harkin, was it just last June that I blogged about Harkin trying to pull rank on people waiting in line at an airport security checkpoint? One of my first blogging efforts, that. I’d forgotten all about it until last night.

I linked, at the time to Lloyd Grove in the Washington Shaft….

(The changed look in the Blog will give you an indication of how far this blog has come in 6 months!)

Addendum, 13:00hrs: It should also perhaps be pointed out that Lieberman, the other half of the Losers, didn’t fare too well either. For all that Dean’s more vocal supporters scream about Dean being the outsider, and complain that Dean’s defeat signals a lean toward Democrat business as usual, let’s face it; Dean looked and looks, for all the world, like a Democrat insider. Associating with the party’s biggest losers may have irreparably hurt his chances at being nominated.

Drudge is reporting today that:

“The senator from North Carolina ‘strongly opposes investing Social Security in the stock market,’ according to his campaign website.

On September 27, 1998, Edwards told a gathering at Elon College how a small part of the Social Security fund should be invested in stocks and bonds ‘to see the kind of returns it would produce.’ “

Amazing what a little research can do.
And so, once again, Matt’s point about why he (and other bloggers after him) are doing so well, while the mainstream press’ following dwindles…. the mainstream press, had it done it’s homework, and eliminbated it’s inherent liberal bias, would have been reporting this months ago, and eliminated this slimeball from the race beore he got rolling.

This flip-flopping without consequence does seem to fall in line with the thoughts I posted at Drezner’s yesterday. (Scroll down to find it)

The real thing here is this: When a Democrat claims a position on the issues, ask yourself; can you trust him to continue to hold that posiiton?

Daniel Weintraub is reporting a bit of an upset going on in California:

“Dean and Clark are atop what looks like a two-man race for the Democratic presidential delegates from California, but President Bush holds at least a narrow lead in hypothetical matchups with all the Democratic contenders. So says the latest Field Poll.”

The implications to Weintraub’s point, go well beyond California. Consider the money situation. Even with millionares like Soros trying to overcome all the small donors putting their hard-earned money into RNC coffers, they’re going to have a hard time to come up to what the RNC already has in the bank, much less the support being picked up on the fly.  If California stays close, or if (Snicker) W starts pulling away out there, the Democrats will be forced to start spending their smaller bank accounts in California to hold it’s electoral votes. Which means they won’t be able to spend it elsewhere… and thereby even if they pull off an upset in California, the Democrats won’t be in the running anywhere else but NY, and parts of New England.

Meaning, W for another term, no matter what they do.

BBC NEWS is reporting this morning about how closely government workers are monitored:

“A tax office official in Finland who died at his desk went unnoticed by up to 30 colleagues for two days.
The man in his 60s died last Tuesday while checking tax returns, but no-one realised he was dead until Thursday.”

Several others followed this story as well, this morning… Apparently, there were 30 other workers in this office… and nobody noticed for two whole days that this guy’s nap was a bit longer than usual, or that his productivity was a bit off.

The Austrailian papers are suggesting that his co-workers were off at meetings, and so didn’t notice, thinking he was silently working on tax returns.

All of them? For two days?

Only in government….

Looks like Conservative Issues/Com has gone dark. The address still shows on my DNS as going to SimpleHost, but the SimpleHost server rejects all requests.

Sad to see him go; CI was running echoes of my weekly column there for a while, and had a nice start on things. No word on what’s happened. I’ll let you know.  Of course if YOU have info, drop me a line. E-Mail button’s on the upper right corner of this page.

I’m prepareing this site to be moved to a commerical host. As such I’m trying to trim the un-needed bandwidth a bit. An easy way to deal with that is not to display a whole month of posts each time I get hit. I’ve made changes in the archive structure for one week intervals, and changed the main display to scroll ten (10) days worth. That should help with the bandwidth.

One problem with those settings, of course is it’ll be a bit harder to find stuff.
Fear not; (grin) I’ll be adding a search engine pretty soon… in the next day or two. Likely, it’ll be Google. Atually, I tend to prefer Alta-Vista for a lot of seearch times, and tend to alternate between them. But for this site, Google will likely be the best and most up to date, since Google owns Blogspot. (Shrug)

I’ll keep you posted.

Update: I’ve moved it back for now; the transition wasn’t a smooth one. It quote the Pope, it is as it was.

BET.com – The Country’s Most Segregated Cities:

According to BET, they are:

10. Philadelphia
9. Chicago
8. New York City
7. Buffalo-Niagra Falls, N.Y.
6. Cincinnati
5. Newark, N.J.
4. St. Louis
3. Cleveland-Lorain-Elyria, Ohio
2. Detroit
1. Milwaukee-Waukesha, Wis.”

Black Entertainment Television (BET) goes on, on their site to whine:

Why are we still separating ourselves? Shouldn’t we be able to live, work, go to school and church together? Tell us what you think.

OK, three points;

First notice none of them are southern towns.

Second, all of them are Democrat dominated.

Third, let’s not whine about ‘racial seperation’ until we see an end to BET, the very purpose of which is to deepen and to exploit the very cultural seperation they claim they’re decrying, here.