Sleeper: If I Vote for Obama, It’ll Be Because…
One of the better things I’ve read on Barack Obama’s candidacy lately is this piece by Jim Sleeper: If I Vote for Obama, It’ll Be Because…
44 Responses to “Sleeper: If I Vote for Obama, It’ll Be Because…”
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January 9th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Would someone besides me please look into New Hampshire’s lack of reform with respect to black box voting and optical scanner automated vote counting, the ease with which tabulated results can be hacked by various methods including proprietary malicious code which can skim votes off losing candidates to add to the second place candidate so that the tabulated official results show the second place candidate as the winner?
January 9th, 2008 at 11:45 am
Whenever Obama speaks I get goose bumps. He speaks straight from the heart – no pre-drafted speeches from professional writers and shit like that. Just real, hopeful and inspirational words.
Hey America: Yes YOU Can!
January 9th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Yet you abhor Dana Perino. I wonder about you…
January 9th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Haha.
I get, um, goosebumps, when watching Dana.
January 9th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
Looks like if they went back and counted the paper ballots by hand, Obama would have won that one not Clinton. Oh, well that’s progress in America I guess…
http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=DEMOCRATS
January 10th, 2008 at 5:08 am
…and if they would have counted them 10 more times, the winner would have been Al Gore.
January 11th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
gee whiz Leadbutt you sure make smart comments.
Anyone else see a problem when the handcounted ballots show thousands of fewer votes for Clinton and thousands of more votes for Obama than the official optical scanned votes for each candidate? Given the 3% spread between the two candidates, the result could have been different. But more importantly, if your f*cking vote counters are off by several thousand you might as well be living in Zimbabwe.
Kucinich has requested a re-count, someone let me know how it turns out because I’m getting tired of watching these banana republic voting schemes unfold in the moranic* USA.
*aka moronic
January 13th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Hmmmm. Three questions:
(1) If polls are reliable predictors, how was it possible that various pre-election polling had Obama winning by as little as 5% and as much as 13%? Asked another way, if pre-election polling has even remote validity (reliability), how is that wide variance possible?
(2) How did pollsters determine whether their data was determined by results from Democrat voters?
(3) If polls are reliable, (a) why do results vary, often dramatically, (b) why have more than a single one of them, and (c) why bother with expensive, unnecessarily elections?
RE #2, one would be hard-pressed to find a poll in which the results didn’t have to be “adjusted” to account for an over-sampling of Democrats, leading any critical observer to suspect that pollsters do not (intend to?) obtain an honest prediction by us an appropriate percentage sampling of an entire population. My point: As always, I suspect that polls are a reflection of opinions in largely liberal-leaning urban areas where Republican voters are less conservative than those in more rural areas.
I opine that polls serve only one primary purpose – to influence opinion – and that purpose provides incentive for disengenuity by pollsters, i.e. skewed, false results. If polls provide any other service to voters, someone please enlighten me.
The “5% poll” is most often cited in post-election discussion, but the Clinton people obviously gave the “13% poll” greater credibility, since the day before the election they were stating that any loss of less than double digits would be considered a “win” for Hillary.
January 14th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
TV,
No idea what your polling rant has to do with this post or thread.
Perhaps you misunderstood that the figures I quoted were the differences between ACTUAL votes counted by hand vs. ACTUAL votes counted by machines constructed by companies with very strong Rethuglican sympathy.
By the way, pre-election polls historically have varied accuracy and many are biased enough to deserve much of the criticism you cite, however exit polls are a different matter entirely. But that’s covered in a more recent thread than this so no need to further repeat that topic here.
January 14th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
I guess I’m a little confused why you are blaming Republicans? Why would they care what happens in a Democratic primary to the two frontrunners when they are as closely matched as these two are. If we (Republicans) wanted to win the election in November by messing with the machines wouldn’t it make more sense to give a second tier candidate a boost if not a surprise win?
January 14th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
Knarly, polls have everything to do with everything when discussing politics with today’s left-wingers.
Among other things, exit polls rely on (1) truthful responses about a secret ballot, (2) using a cross-section of voter responses from all geographic areas, (3) without targeting voters based on visual demographics, etc.
(1) In a country as politically divided as ours, with both “sides” mistrusting motives of media and other pollsters, the truthful responses are doubtful. (2&3) In our mainly rural county of 90,000, only one exit poll has ever been conducted – in a precinct with more than 90% African-American voters, hardly representative of our county or state population, therefore yielding false results.
Sorry, but exit polls are only as reliable as the pollsters. Maybe all Canadian voters are completely forthright and honest super-humans, and no exit pollsters there are agenda-driven, but the 2004 U.S. exit polls were fatally flawed. The 2000 exit poll results on our East Coast were certainly used to influence voters in all the time zones where voting booths closed hours later. I’m still wondering/asking how any polls, certainly [especially] including exit polls, are beneficial to voters.
shcb, they blame Republicans from force of habit, incapable of looking anywhere else.
January 15th, 2008 at 5:11 am
Yeah, that was something of a rhetorical question, I just like to hear Knarly’s convoluted answers to logic. God knows I’m guilty of saying things before I’ve thought them through, most good drinking stories have that at the root. But I usually give that shy grin and shrug my shoulders and say “that wasn’t very bright of me was it?”
How is rehab going?
January 15th, 2008 at 10:40 am
shcb, Look into the ownership of the major voting machine companies (it’
s not hard there are only a few). You will find staunchly Republican and very politically partisian inclined owners/CEO’s behind the most prevalent and most contentious voting machines.
As to why the votes for Hillary and Obama were manipulated in NH, *IF * they were manipulated like the evidence now suggests absent a good explanation for the differences between hand and machine counts, how the hell should I know why (or care for that matter)? At this point anything is possible, because the machines have been demonstrated as being so easily hacked. Many people have the means and opportunity to change the tabulated results on any whim. Maybe it was done as a joke. Who cares, the point is that the whole voting excercise is worse than a waste of time if the results can be manipulated, even slightly, by anyone beyond one person one vote.
TV, explain why exit polls have been very accurate for every election up until the 2000 elections and then have had wide discrepancies in accuracy since, with consistant accuracy in precincts with hand counted ballots and high inaccuracies only in those elections that utilitize computerized vote tabulators?
I’m not concerned with whether exit polls are useful to other voters or not, you can go ahead and pass restrictive speech laws to prohibit the announcment of the results of exit polls until the elections are over for all I care.
The fact is that exit polls exist, and they have historically been an excellent reflection of how the people in the particular precinct that is being polled have just voted.
The problem as I see it is that exit polls inexplicably lose their accuracy only when people vote on machines that are vulnerable to malevant software.
January 15th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
See TV, it’s fun to watch him thrash about. If I get a chance, and it is low on my list, I will see if I can find some numbers to refute the assertions above.
January 15th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Rehab has gone well, then the wife fell down our last flight of stairs and had compound fractures of all the bones in her ankle 10 weeks ago. I’ll save the details of the amazing dog story, but our little wire-haired terrier literally forced me to get up and go downstairs where I found her, in shock at that point. Thanks for asking. And your sister’s house?
Knarly, I don’t know why the exit polls worked so well until 2000 any more than I know the degree to which they influenced voters in the western U.S. in those years. I already answered the rest of your question in my previous post. I guess it boils down to two possibilities: (a) the circumstances I listed previously, or (b) a massive conspiracy.
I appreciate the honest answer that you are “not concerned with whether exit polls are useful” to voters, although those who wish to influence other voters certainly are concerned, and they use them to advance their agenda. If I lived in California and knew the election was already decided, I would probably join the thousands who decide against fighting Orange County traffic for a useless vote.
Your last statement illustrates your unwillingness to look at all possibilities – “…exit polls inexplicably lose their accuracy only when…”, after I had already cited a proven, real-life scenario that contradicts your own premise of an alleged potential for dishonesty.
January 15th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Tv,
Sis got moved into her house just before Christmas, they still have some stucco to finish after it warms up a bit. We may have to trade wonderdog stories, we lost one in the Rocky Mountains for 72 days, got her back a week ago, she’s fine, just like she was gone for the weekend.
January 16th, 2008 at 6:16 am
here is something I found this morning, don’t know who this guy is, I haven’t even read it completely. It seems that in certain states at certain times there have been double digit differences between the polls and reality, remember too that NH is quite lax with who can vote and how they can vote.
http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/12/have_the_exit_p.html
January 16th, 2008 at 9:17 am
And:
“While it is true that the controversy surrounding the exit polls, beginning in 1980, was largely about whether or not use of these polls by the media to project winners before polls closed had the effect of discouraging late-in-day voters, they fail to consider that the before poll closing exit polls had a record of being terribly wrong (1984, 1988, and 1992 elections).”
That statement, along with many others derailing the myth that exit polling was infallible prior to 2000, is justified in exhaustive detail at:
http://www.stonescryout.org/archives/2005/03/critique_of_sim.html
From the same article: “We all know the exit polls are significantly discrepant. What we do not know is exactly what happened. I’ve stated before, and I’ll state it again: Given the data currently in the public domain, we do not know if the exit poll discrepancy can be explained by: 1) sampling error; 2) non-sampling error; 3) inaccurate vote count; or 4) any combination of 1-3.”
Knarly accepts no possibility but #3.
Glad you got your pooch back, shcb – man’s best friend, indeed, and vice versa.
January 16th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
No, TV, the fact is that I accept no possibility that you have any comprehension of what I do or do not accept.
Your pretending to know what I accept or reject is the surest way to destroy your own credibility.
January 16th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Sorry if I read you wrong, but when every comment you make on the subject consists of accusatory references to devious manipulation of voting machines (apparently only by evil Republicans, although, as you said earlier, “many people have the means and opportunity to change the tabulated results on any whim” [presumably that would include some Democrats, even though I haven’t witnessed your consideration of that possibility]), with a steadfast refusal to examine other obvious possibilities, the conclusion is inevitable.
It matters not whether my credibility is in doubt since that doubt is based merely on rejection of conclusions I might have drawn about your obvious obsessions. Oops, another conclusion drawn – my credibility has self-destructed – I’m doomed.
January 16th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Nah, I didn’t intend to refuse to consider other possibilities, I just didn’t think they fit as well but even more so I was trying to get you to look at the possibility of vote rigging with an open mind instead of ridiculing the possibility simply because you haven’t seen anyone on Fox complaining about it, yet.
Seems like you’ve opened up to the possibility since you mention three possibilites or a combination of them as plausible. You have come a long way from your earlier knee jerk ridicule of the topic.
And yea sure anyone can be suspect at this point as the vote counting machines appears in may key places to be total SNAFU when compared to a simple hand counting of ballots. Leaning to suspect Republicans is mainly a result of die hard republican supporters being the proprietary owners of the machines’ software and controllers of companies that make the machines. And that most of the most suspicious potential electronic vote counting fraud in state and federal elections favoured Republicans.
January 16th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Although my politics tend to make me lean towards Democrats, I wouldn’t say I support them. It’s more like the lesser of two evils. More choice would be good.
Also, don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Republicans, most of my favourite dogs have exhibited strong Republican tendencies.
January 17th, 2008 at 6:05 am
I’m still trying to get my arms around this conspiracy. So the CEOs of these companies are Republican, with the exception of Ben and Jerry’s, Progressive Insurance, Apple, and Google pretty much every CEO is a Republican. But how do they change the count? Do they personally, like Santa Claus, run from precinct to precinct changing the software in every voting machine to give more votes to the Republicans? Did they imbed code that picks out Republican sounding names and adds votes to them while subtracting votes from liberal and minority sounding names? This is problematic to me since most CEOs I know aren’t technically savvy enough to fill their own gas tanks. Have they enlisted an army of computer geeks to man the polling places to sabotage the machines (cleverly disguised as old retired folks)? Secret encoder rings and everything. I know the most obvious place is in the transfer from precinct to the total count. I was just kind of having fun, but still how and why would these Republican CEO’s risk getting caught changing results only on the Democratic side of the second primary of the race? Is anyone saying they screwed with the Republican side in NH? No. Why? Because your guy lost and he wasn’t supposed to in your eyes, just like Gore, he lost when he wasn’t supposed to so there was a fox in the hen house somewhere.
January 17th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
I agree, most CEO’s I’ve encountered can’t program a VCR. However, they have the power and ability to ensure their demands, for whatever level of security they want in their products, are met. Alternatively, if their demands for unhackable security are impossible to meet, they have a duty not to represent their product as if it were fully secure. Anything less is fraud, or incompetence on a scale far beyond what could reasonably be imagined for the CEO and persons involved with the programming or oversight of the programming.
That there are – in fact and amply demonstrated – numerous ways to bypass security features, by a person in contact with the machines, or in some cases accessing them through a dial-in connection, is evidence of the CEO’ willingness to misrepresent their product with obvious results in terms of injury to election veracity.
January 17th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
shcb, so for NH who do you think is “my guy”? I do not endorse any current democratic candidate.
Apparently Kucinich is doing a partial recount at a cost of $27,000 to his campaign, so if there is discrepancy in the paper ballots we may find out soon, not sure how that relates to the computer tallies though.
And you are also wrong saying that no-one thinks the Republican NH primary was tampered with, there have been similar grumblings about vote skimming from trailing candidates but I have not been following that story except to note that Ron Paul did not consider it a valid caim or important enough to divert his financial resources to investigate further.
January 17th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
I can see no reason why anyone on this site who will vote Democratic in this next election with the exception of Ethan would not be pulling for Obama. You guys are all against this war on terror, you can be for no one else. Hillary isn’t going to surrender, Obama will. Simple as that. Short of a nuke burning a big hole in New York or Chicago we are pulling back to fortress America post haste if Obama is elected. You may be for one of the second or third tier candidates but that would render your opinion meaningless because no one else is electable in the primary, let alone the general election.
January 18th, 2008 at 8:50 am
You seem obsessed with seeing your country get nuked, it’s kind of strange. You bring it up on a weekly basis.
You have let the terrorists scare you. You have to stay strong in the face of these cavemen. As already discussed, you are much, much more likely to be struck by lightning than to be nuked by a caveman.
January 18th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Statistically over the last 50 years you are more likely to be killed by Arab terrorists than lightning in the United States alone, world wide it would go back much further. Rattle snakes scare me too, it doesn’t mean I don’t hike in the hills, I just don’t step over logs without looking, there is nothing wrong with being prepared. Prairie dogs ruined one of our $3,000 dogs, we had to sell it for a couple hundred bucks. The prairie dogs are killed as they move on to our property every spring now, we haven’t had a dog injured since. There is nothing wrong with being preemptive either. Prairie dogs aren’t happy, but me and mine are.
January 18th, 2008 at 11:08 am
But, shcb, the prairie dogs have demonstrated that they are a real threat, while all the good religion of peace folks are just trying to defend their right to co-exist in accordance with the Koran…
January 18th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
You know, growing up prairie dogs were the only thing my dad let us kill without eating, now I understand why. They are cute and interesting, but my word are they destructive.
Co-exist as long as you covert.
January 18th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Sylvestor Stallone had a few things to say about why Rambo isn’t fighting Islamofascists in his new movie. It doesn’t sound like he has much respect for all the suckers who buy the new story politicians tell them.
I also like the scene from “Good Will Hunting” that someone posted in the comment section below:
http://www.911blogger.com/node/13430
Enjoy…
January 18th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
What is really frightening to anyone left of rwnj and tv is the easy way that they demonize a billion people simply because of their religion.
Somewhat chilling how eager gun happy rwnjs are to ‘joke’ that muslim = prairie dog (and thus killing all muslims = ‘good’). Does anyone think that the (mid 20th century right wing totalitarian mid-european nutjob)s didn’t call a certain religious minority ‘rats’ and ‘dogs’ as a way to justify and sanctify their extermination? rwnjs think violence is the first best solution to everything. That and tax cuts. If you can’t bomb or shoot it, cut taxes for the rich!
How many times has dear rwnj or TV called me or others here seditious traitors? (the penalty for sedition is hanging btw)
As to the body count: let us guesstimate there are perhaps 210,000 dead Iraqis because of shrub’s folly. That is 70 times the size of 9/11 (which pissed us off big time, justifiably releasing our military on the Taliban and OBL – who is still alive btw). So in a nation that is less than 1/10th of our size this is like having 700 9/11s happen over the last 4.5 years. Let us just call it 1000 9/11s over 5 years, or 200 9/11s every single year. That is roughly a 9/11 every other day.
I think 210,000 is pretty conservative as the number of dead from bad water, lack of electricity, spoiled medicine, food etc should be in this number of Iraqi War dead. I also count the dead from insurgent bombs as well as American ‘misses’ (and hits). These people would be alive if it weren’t for the neocon dream. Oh sure we killed some real bad guys now and then, but does that justify killing 4x as many civilians? Have we found teh WMDz!1!1!!! yet? No and no (there weren’t any).
I wonder if yMom will delete my post because it doesn’t live up to his lofty standards of ‘debate’?
Or should we just go back to debating the relative merits of Ginger vs Mary Anne?
January 18th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
It seems to me that they are truly ignorant about how their manner of thinking has and continues to cause the greatest of evils.
January 18th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Of course I never said kill all Arabs or anything remotely close, but demagogs rarely engage in accuracy.
January 18th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Knarly, the Rambo movies were meant to reinforce the false stereotype of returning Vietnam vets that had been created. If he actually believed in the character, nothing Stallone says could be believed anyway. Mr. Credibility (Dan Rather) certainly made his contribution to that effort with his [other] false documentary, “The Wall Within.”
enkidu, I understand your frustration. Since non-combat deaths are used to inflate “war casualty” numbers, it figures that you would prefer to include deaths from non-war related causes in the civilian casualty numbers. What shcb said above about accuracy… Would it be fair to subtract the number of Shiites and Kurds who would have died at the hands of the Saddam regime in the last 4.5 years from that number, using the average figures from before March 2003? Nah, it wouldn’t serve the purpose to look at both sides of the equation.
Of course, you’re right that I shouldn’t have compared prairie dogs to Islamofascists – prairie dogs are cute and interesting, and their destructiveness is natural, not based on a doctrine of hatred.
January 18th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Enkidu nailed shcb and TV cold on that. I am a moderately intelligent person and shcb & TV are not fooling me, nor anyone smarter than I, with their transparent metaphors about what or who they consider to be threats and how they think such things should be dealt with – kill as many as possible. War is hell, unless you are 3,000 miles away drinking bear and watching Britney Spears on Entertainment Tonight.
On a related subject, I found this fascinating for some parallels with current thinking that I did not realize, I will have to re-think a few of my beliefs:
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0703a.asp
The knuckle draggers will, indubitably, fail to see the merits of the article and how it relates to their own careless thought processes.
January 19th, 2008 at 12:59 am
Not so strangely, you find anyone who agrees you credible, but those who disagree with you risk destroying their credibility. Funny.
I can’t speak for shcb, but I don’t drink bear, couldn’t pick Britney Spears out of a 2-person lineup, and don’t know the channel of Entertainment Tonight. Be careful, such presumptive analysis of me can destroy your credibility. :-)
The article you linked was at least 90% devoted to positive comparisons of Hitler and FDR, their similar programs (Social Security, other social schemes such as government-run schools, national health care, economic fascism, the suspension of civil liberties, etc.), and their respect for each other. As the author states, “…very few Americans realize that Social Security, public schooling, Medicare, and Medicaid have their idealogical roots in German socialism.” You know, all those government-run programs that are failing and going broke. Those damned socialist Rethuglican nazis again – I can see how you might have to re-think a few of your beliefs.
The second page wouldn’t open up for me (PC needs rebooting), but maybe that’s where the credible Bush-bashing you admire was written. Of course I’m one of those knuckle dragging goose-steppers who only supports Bush because I’m fearful that a family member might report me if I speak against him. I’d hate to be thrown in a gulag by the Bush SS for speaking out against him; it happens here all the time, you know, and I never know which of my students are covert members of the Bush Youth.
January 19th, 2008 at 8:51 am
I don’t drink anymore, (don’t drink any less either) bada bing. I don’t want to exterminate all Arabs like Hitler wanted to exterminate all Jews. Just the radicals causing problems. I have left a few prairie dogs in the creek bed, they are a part of nature. This was the range of them originally before we moved in with our HOA’s that determined this treeless short grass plain should look like a forested golf course. So we cut down the grass and weeds and irrigated the hell out of the trees and the rats were free to expand. Now we have to push them back to their natural level. We homeowners absolutely caused the problem and now have to fix it. And unfortunately the only way to fix it is to kill the little rascals. We have learned from out mistakes and are growing tall vegetation in areas so we can keep a few of the critters to feed the coyotes and hawks but a certain percentage have to be killed. Not unlike the situation in the middle east.
January 21st, 2008 at 1:37 pm
sweet baby jeebuz but your reading comprehension is severely distorted by partisan bullshit TV. So… any country that implements universal healthcare is following the Final Solution of the Nazis eh? your stupidity isn’t even worth mocking any more. you do a great job of parodying yourself. Moran.
as to the whole ‘kill them evil prairie dogs/muslims’ metaphor:
funny, I bet I could ask teh Goog about your repeated statements that (paraphrasing rwnj blather here) ‘we are at war with a billion Mooslmen!!1!1!’ which sounds alot like your fantasies that we found teh WMDz!!!! Iraq is going just swell! shrub is competent etc etc etc
both you rwnjs repeatedly proclaim your gawd given right to shoot anything you consider ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ (pretty much 98% of the rest of the planet)…
you repeatedly use a embarrassingly transparent metaphor (prairie dogs = bad, Muslim = bad, so they all must die die die!!!!) so your genocidal fantasies can be ‘justified’
364 days until shrub is a footnote in history: the Worst US president ever.
January 21st, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Dude, ya kin ‘nore it all ya wanna, but the parallel wuz drawn in the site giv’n by yer little diddle-buddy from the Nawth cuntry. Diddle dah Goog an read it fer youse’f ‘n’ draw yer on ‘clusions. Gawd didn’t give me the right to shoot 98% of the rest of the planet, tho a moranic lwdh such as yew cant see thru the fog of yur hatred well nuff to cee dat dem terr’sts d’clard war on us ‘ginnin’ ’bout a yar ‘fore Jimmuh the Grate leffed offise. Gotta hand it to yer tho, u 1 hip dude, ‘n’ a helluva paraphraser.
P.S. – Goer ‘n’ Carry both lost; git ovar it.
January 21st, 2008 at 2:59 pm
???
put down the crack pipe chief
January 21st, 2008 at 4:34 pm
sorry tonto but when in rome… wanna communicate n dont have teh cool hip jive shiite down but i b tryin to speek yo language dude
What you said – my point exactly
January 22nd, 2008 at 7:09 am
probably sounds cool when you write it but just seems childish when you read someone else writing it. A little goes a long way.
January 22nd, 2008 at 9:08 am
you two bozos are funny!
so adding a couple “1”s into a series of exclamation marks (emulating a breathlessly enthusiastic cellular text msg) and tweaking your spittle flecked beard about being so incredibly wrong about Saddam’s vast horde of world threatening WMDs (oops forgot the wink n a nod “z”) elicits a whole paragraph of incomprehensible drivel? Golly TV it must still really hurt that you are so completely and utterly wrong about those WMDs huh chief? My smackdown of your wingnuttery was ridiculously easy to accomplish, because your childish reliance on rightwing bullshit doesn’t stand the harsh light of reality.
There were no WMDs.
bush is incompetent (and probably still a drunk).
You are a partisan tool.