Moveon.org put together a commercial in 12 hours that reminds us that Arnold not only has been groping women for decades but that just a few weeks ago he told Entertainment Weekly, “How many times can you get away with this – to take a woman, grab her upside down, and bury her face in a toilet bowl?” What sort of person finds that even vaguely appealing?

It reminds of the time when my college had a guest lecturer in and one of the students began a comment, “Everyone wants to climb a bell tower and start picking people off with a rifle, right?” Well, no, wrong.

11 Comments »

I don’t usually get sentimental about money. Here’s an exception…

Frankly, I thought they were nuts when the Dean campaign gave itself the very public goal of raising $5M in ten days, mainly over the Internet. And it looked like I was right as the thermometers on the Dean site slowly edged up.

But last night, they made it and came damn close to the absurd goal of raising $15M in a quarter, breaking the previous record of $10.4M set by Bill Clinton when he was president and not competing for funds with 9 other candidates.

Ah, but you point out that W has raised multiples of that. True. But here’s the point that truly matters: The average donation to the Dean campaign was something like $77. That’s the sound of the grassroots rooting.

5 Comments »

From Lloyd Grove in The Daily News :

The Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign has just issued a helpful “Frequently Asked Questions” memo to its New York fund-raisers:

Question: “Can I use my personal aircraft for campaign business?”

Answer: “No, you may not use your personal aircraft for campaign business. Corporate aircraft may be used, but only if each person boarding the plane pays the equivalent of a first-class airplane ticket.”

Q: “Can I have a fund-raising cocktail party for my friends at a private club or hotel and pay for the party?”

A: “No. You may have them come to your house and treat them up to $1,000 in expenses per adult in the household without it counting against your $2,000 contribution limit.”

Q: “Can I use my executive assistant to help with my fund-raising activities?”

A: “Any person can volunteer to help. Employees may volunteer a maximum of 1 (one) hour per week during working hours and an unlimited amount outside of the office.”/

Thanks for the link goes to the Dean Blog where it looks like they’re going to come awfully close to raising $15 million dollars this quarter, from about 175,000 contributors, hardly any of whom own their own aircraft.

2 Comments »

The American Library Association celebrates Read Banned Books Week by listing the books most frequently challenged authors in 2002 and the 100 most challenged from 1990-2002.

The most challenged books of 2002:

Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling, for its focus on wizardry and magic.
Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, for being sexually explicit, using offensive language and being unsuited to age group.
“The Chocolate War” by Robert Cormier (the “Most Challenged” book of 1998), for using offensive language and being unsuited to age group.
“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou, for sexual content, racism, offensive language, violence and being unsuited to age group.
“Taming the Star Runner” by S.E. Hinton, for offensive language.
“Captain Underpants” by Dav Pilkey, for insensitivity and being unsuited to age group, as well as encouraging children to disobey authority.
“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain, for racism, insensitivity and offensive language.
“Bridge to Terabithia” by Katherine Paterson, for offensive language, sexual content and Occult/Satanism.
“Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” by Mildred D. Taylor, for insensitivity, racism and offensive language.
“Julie of the Wolves” by Jean Craighead George, for sexual content, offensive language, violence and being unsuited to age group.

The most distressing thing is that the home page of the ALA shows how politicized the freedom to read has become.

3 Comments »

Salon has an article by Farhad Manjoo recounting how the venerable IEEE’s committee on electronic voting standards went off the rails:

Is the voting equipment industry trying to silence its opponents in a standards group that has traditionally been committed to openness? That’s hard to say definitively … People have been given conflicting and confusing instructions on how to join the group; some members appear to have been accorded preferential treatment; the committee’s leaders have used some technically legal but not very nice parliamentary procedures to prevent opponents from expressing their views; and when critics of the industry have managed to make comments, they appear to have been summarily ignored.

…But some members of the committee are reluctant to put all of the blame on voting industry officials. One person who asked not to be identified said that advocates for strong security systems in voting machines seemed reluctant to work with others in the group and were only interested in pushing a “political agenda.”

Here’s a page (by David Dill) that clearly explains the e-voting issue and what a “voter-verifiable” process might look like: the voter gets to see the paper record of her vote before she presses the electronic plunger to record it.

And here’s an EFF petition.

3 Comments »

From Jim Warren:

A leading County Elections Official, Warren Slocum of San Mateo County, California, has become increasingly concerned about the integrity of some elections systems widely used throughout the United States for local, state and federal elections. His concerns include their lack of complete audit trails and the secret, “proprietary” software used in some of these major voting systems, which dominate more and more of elections technology used in this nation’s public elections.

To publicize the issues, concerns, dangers and solutions, he has begun the first blog devoted to VERIFIABLE voting technology.

This issue is either going to crack open soon or it’s going to become the Black Helicopters of the lefties…

5 Comments »

MSNBC reports that the CIA has asked for an investigation of who in the White House – in order to retaliate against the former ambassador who debunked the White House’s lie about Saddam seeking Nigerian uranium. – leaked the fact that the ambassador’s wife was an active CIA agent.

Man, you don’t want to piss off the CIA…

Be the first to comment »

I haven’t seen it, but people who have say that the Paul Krugman webcast at Berkeley yesterday was hard-hitting and worth watching.

3 Comments »

Dean in Boston. (It helps to imagine a crowd roaring as you read it.)

If you haven’t yet contributed to the Dean campaign – or even if you have – this would be a good time to. Closing the quarter with a bang would make a huge difference to the dynamics of the race.

5 Comments »

I’m no statistician — in fact, I’m no someone who’s ever gotten a statistic right — but doesn’t “margin of error” actually mean something?

Here’s MSNBC’s coverage of the latest poll of Democrats and “democratic leaners” [Forgot the capital, eh?] from Newsweek. The question seems to have been: Which Democrat do you support for President?

Clark: 14%
Dean: 12%
Lieberman: 12%
Kerry: 10%
Gephardt: 8%

Margin of error: plus or minus three points.

MSNBC’s conclusion: “Retired Gen. Wesley Clark may have only entered the presidential race on Thursday, but he is already the Democratic frontrunner…”

Shouldn’t the actual headline be:

Now, lest you think I’m merely defending my boy Howie, let me hasten to add that the report continues: “The president?s approval rating now stands at 51 percent, down 1 point from last week?s poll…” Again, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the actual result of the poll that the president’s approval rating has not changed in a statistically significant way? That Bush’s overall approval rating was at 65% in May is another story, and that his rating for his handling of the War in Iraq slid five points to 46% in a week is an even bigger story.

I think MSNBC came to the wrong conclusion with these numbers as well: Dean fared worse (52% to 38%) than Clark (47% to 43%) and Kerry (48% to 43%) when matched up against Bush. Certainly MSNBC is just plain wrong when it says that “Clark fared better than the others” because of a 1% difference against Bush. But isn’t the difference between 38 and 43 statistically insignificant if the margin of error is plus or minus 3?

8 Comments »