Thoughts Aloud

Archive for October, 2008

Possible voter fraud in South Bend:

A South Bend woman says someone tried to trick her into thinking she already voted.

Now St. Joseph County elections official are telling voters not to fall for the newest type of voter fraud.

“I feel really bad for my old age that’s the first time that I got scammed like that, terrible,” said the woman, who didn’t want to be identified.

She says she received a phone call from a woman claiming to be an elections official.

“This young lady was saying they’re doing something new and something different and I don’t have to go out and vote,” she said.

The caller said people could now vote by phone and asked her who she wanted to vote for.

The woman said John McCain.

She was then told her vote was cast and she didn’t need to vote Tuesday.

How are we to ever have the slightest confidence that any close contests were not stolen by these unprincipled Acorn type Progressives who will do absolutely anything required to win? What is the point of even bothering to vote anymore? ◄Dave►

The evidence continues to mount that much of the Anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW) hysteria is junk science. Now MIT is turning on them:

Boston (MA) – Scientists at MIT have recorded a nearly simultaneous world-wide increase in methane levels. This is the first increase in ten years, and what baffles science is that this data contradicts theories stating man is the primary source of increase for this greenhouse gas. It takes about one full year for gases generated in the highly industrial northern hemisphere to cycle through and reach the southern hemisphere. However, since all worldwide levels rose simultaneously throughout the same year, it is now believed this may be part of a natural cycle in mother nature – and not the direct result of man’s contributions.

Methane – powerful greenhouse gas

The two lead authors of a paper published in this week’s Geophysical Review Letters, Matthew Rigby and Ronald Prinn, the TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science, state that as a result of the increase, several million tons of new methane is present in the atmosphere.

Methane accounts for roughly one-fifth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, though its effect is 25x greater than that of carbon dioxide. Its impact on global warming comes from the reflection of the sun’s light back to the Earth (like a greenhouse). Methane is typically broken down in the atmosphere by the free radical hydroxyl (OH), a naturally occuring process. This atmospheric cleanser has been shown to adjust itself up and down periodically, and is believed to account for the lack of increases in methane levels in Earth’s atmosphere over the past ten years despite notable simultaneous increases by man.

Quick, somebody invent an afterburner for cows to save our planet. ◄Dave►

With over 11 Million views, reportedly the highest of all the political ads on YouTube this year, I must be one of the few political junkies who hadn’t seen this:

Under two minutes… and very effective! ◄Dave►

The parents of this kid are lucky Child Protective Services isn’t asking them some embarrassing questions regarding why they put him up to this:

It is only 8 seconds, and the story is in The News & Observer:

CHAPEL HILL – After Shawn Turschak saw two sets of McCain-Palin signs disappear from his yard within hours of being planted, he took steps to protect the latest pair.

On Monday, he ran wires from his house and hooked the signs into a power source for an electric pet fence. Then he mounted a surveillance camera in a nearby tree and wired it to a digital recorder.

Tuesday afternoon, the camera saw this: A neighbor trotting up with an Obama-Biden sign, grabbing a handful of volts as he touched a McCain-Palin sign, then fleeing at top 9-year-old boy speed…

The video, Turschak said, makes clear that the boy was planning to switch the signs, which are essentially sheathes that slip over metal framework. The boy had only brought the Democratic sheath, not the legs.

If it had been his mother or father it would be hilarious. ◄Dave►

John Stossel has it exactly right.  Uninformed people have, “A Duty Not To Vote.”:

I keep hearing how important it is for everyone to vote.

Let me be politically incorrect and say that maybe some people shouldn’t vote.

I know I’m swimming against the tide. Get-out the-vote groups now register young people at rock concerts. HeadCount cofounder Andy Bernstein told me: “We registered over a 100,000 people. It is so imperative that this generation’s voice is heard.”

But wait. Is that really a good idea? Many kids don’t know much. At a HeadCount concert, “20/20″ asked some future voters, “How many senators are there?” One said 12, another 16, and another 64. One girl guessed, “50 per state.”

Most kids didn’t know what Roe v. Wade was about. “Roe vs. Wayne?” asked one. “Segregation, maybe?” “Where we declared bankruptcy?”

I have been saying this forever for the same reasons, but he goes on to develop the civic duty argument rather well. ◄Dave►

Wow, and the other way for a change. There must be some lucky and/or clever traders making a fortune; but for every happy buyer at the lows, there is an unhappy seller kicking himself.  Have they really found the bottom, or was this a lifeline thrown to McCain?  We will see if it can survive the profit taking in the morning.  I notice gold is holding steady at real bargain basement prices, so the hedge funds are still dumping bullion tonnage on the market to acquire cash for the big boys who are still bailing out.  Of course, the effects of inflation – some say there are now four times the number of dollars in circulation as before the crash – are yet to be felt… ◄Dave►

In The Crypt at Politico:

Boehner hits Obama on ‘redistributive change’

The Obama campaign immediately pushed back, arguing that the Right is deliberately misinterpreting a narrow legal argument Obama was making about decades-old court cases.

“This is a fake news controversy drummed up by the all too common alliance of Fox News, the Drudge Report and John McCain,” said Obama spokesman Bill Burton.

“In this seven year old interview, Senator Obama did not say that the courts should get into the business of redistributing wealth at all.”

Fake Controversy?  My turn to ask, “Is this a joke?” What was narrow about:

the Warren Court…didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution… one of the… tragedies of the Civil Rights movement was… so court-focused… there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.

Please explain, Senator, exactly what you were trying to say, and just how much “redistributive change” do you have in store for us if you are elected? ◄Dave►

Our Constitution is just a political document that paved the way to where we are now… with a fundamental flaw that continues to this day? Hmmm… who is going to fix it? Here is 28 seconds of audio:

…that can make a crusty old man almost weep. ◄Dave►

This guy:

Michael S. Malone is one of the nation’s best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News as the nation’s first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world’s largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the best-selling “Virtual Corporation.” Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, “The New Heroes.” He has been the ABCNews.com “Silicon Insider” columnist since 2000.

…is going to need a new gig.  I am amazed that ABC News actually published his “Media’s Presidential Bias and Decline - Columnist Michael Malone Looks at Slanted Election Coverage and the Reasons Why”:

The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game — with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.

The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun — for the first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer,” because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist…

But nothing, nothing I’ve seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign.

Republicans are justifiably foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press coverage of the two candidates and their running mates. But in the last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass — no, make that shameless support — they’ve gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don’t have a free and fair press…

If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography…

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes & and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain’s. That’s what reporters do. I was proud to have been one, and I’m still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.

So why weren’t those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors. The men and women you don’t see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn’t; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.

And then he explains why, with a simple yet fascinating theory that I had not heard before.  Treat yourself to a good read. ◄Dave►