November 2006 Archives
Mystery of a huge undervote festers in Florida district
Almost since the time the votes were tallied here on election night, the race for Florida's 13th Congressional District has been surrounded by a contentious mystery:
Why were there no votes for Congress recorded from more than 18,000 people who chose candidates in other races?
Howard Zinn on The Uses of History and the War on Terrorism | The Progressive
HOWARD ZINN: Madison is a very special place. I always have a special feeling when I come here. I have a feeling I am in a different country. And I'm glad, you know. Some people get disgusted of the American policy, and they go to live in some other country. No. Go to Madison.
So, now I'm supposed to say something. I am glad you're there, whoever you are, and this light is shining in my eyes to wake me up.
Well, do you get the feeling sometime that you're living in an occupied country? Very often that's a feeling I get when I wake up in the morning. I think, "I'm living in an occupied country. A small group of aliens have taken over the country and are trying to do with it what they will, you know, and really are." I mean, they are alien to me. I mean, those people who are coming across the border from Mexico, they are not alien to me, you see. You know, Muslims who come to this country to live, they are not alien to me, you see. These demonstrations, these wonderful demonstrations that we have seen very recently on behalf of immigrant rights, say, and you've seen those signs saying, you know, "No human being is alien." And I think that's true. Except for the people in Washington, you see.
They've taken over the country. They've taken over the policy. They've driven us into two disastrous wars, disastrous for our country and even more disastrous for people in the Middle East. And they have sucked up the wealth of this country and given it to the rich, and given it to the multinationals, given it to Halliburton, given it to the makers of weapons. They're ruining the environment. And they're holding on to 10,000 nuclear weapons, while they want us to worry about the fact that Iran may, in ten years, get one nuclear weapon. You see, really, how mad can you be?
An empirical examination of Wikipedia's credibility
Wikipedia is an free, online encyclopaedia which anyone can add content to or edit the existing content of. The idea behind Wikipedia is that members of the general public can add their own personal knowledge, anonymously if they wish. Wikipedia then evolves over time into a comprehensive knowledge base on all things. Its popularity has never been questioned, although its authority has. By its own admission, Wikipedia contains errors. A number of people have tested Wikipedia's accuracy using destructive methods, i.e. deliberately inserting errors. This has been criticised by Wikipedia. This short study examines Wikipedia's credibility by asking 258 research staff with a response rate of 21 percent, to read an article and assess its credibility, the credibility of its author and the credibility of Wikipedia as a whole. Staff were either given an article in their own expert domain or a random article. No difference was found between the two group in terms of their perceived credibility of Wikipedia or of the articles' authors, but a difference was found in the credibility of the articles - the experts found Wikipedia's articles to be more credible than the non-experts. This suggests that the accuracy of Wikipedia is high. However, the results should not be seen as support for Wikipedia as a totally reliable resource as, according to the experts, 13 percent of the articles contain mistakes.
After progressive victories across the nation on Election Day - with winning candidates at the federal, state, and local levels, and on issues ranging from the minimum wage to tax policy - two things are clear: the American public is much more receptive to progressive ideas than suggested by the media, and the conservative movement is in disarray.
So it was disappointing on November 17th to read the New York Times recycling of an old story written time and again about the power of rightwing think tanks: "Policy institutes have been central to a national organizing strategy that has long won the right a reputation for savvy, and state-level versions are growing in number and clout."
Yes, it's true, rightwing think tanks have been effective through their ideological discipline and ample resources. But the progressive community recognizes the importance of defining issues and advancing a policy agenda, too. There is now a network of savvy progressive think tanks working at the state level - and they are winning. So here's a modest proposal: perhaps it's time for the paper of record to create a beat on the progressive movement.
Subject drug war to the Iraq War test - 11/19/06 - The Detroit News Online
Now that Washington is awash in rare bipartisan logic about evaluating the goals and strategies of the Iraq War, the same reasoning should apply to the other conflict America is hopelessly mired in: the war on drugs.
The parallel between the two is undeniable.
Like Iraq, the drug war has been pressing ahead at enormous cost and destruction without a pause for an honest assessment of whether the tactics are working, or will ever work.
Yet while it only took three years for the American people to lose patience with the Iraq War, the drug war has been dragging on virtually unchallenged for three decades.
Demand Coverage of GOP 'Robocall' Deception
In closely contested districts across the country, voters report getting automated calls that begin, "Hi, I'm calling with information about [name of Democratic candidate]." If you listen to the rest of the message, you hear a litany of negative claims about the candidate. If you hang up--as do many voters, overwhelmed by so-called robocalls this election season--you're left with the impression that the Democrat has just called you. And unless you listen to the entire call, the machine calls you back again and again, giving you the impression that the Democrat is harassing you (Talking Points Memo, 11/6/06).
These ads are organized and paid for--as you find out at the very end of the ad, contrary to federal regulations (Associated Press, 11/1/06)--by the National Republican Congressional Committee, which coordinates the GOP's campaign to keep control of the House of Representatives. The NRCC's head of opposition research is Terry Nelson, who in 2002 was deputy chief of staff of the Republican National Committee; Nelson was the supervisor of Jim Tobin, the RNC's New England political director, who was convicted of illegally jamming Democratic phone banks in New Hampshire (AlterNet, 11/6/06).
AlterNet: The Disjointed States of America
Those post-2004 election maps that showed a blue "United States of Canada" draped over a big red "Jesusland," witty as they were, painted only an incomplete political picture. Leaving aside the usual election-year fascination with scandal, abortion, sexual orientation, and fear of foreigners, I took a more analytical approach, computing the relationships among states' rankings for eight different economic and environmental characteristics. Based on those rankings, I've bent and stretched the red-blue map in some new directions.
I compiled rankings of the 50 states for a range of characteristics, including wages, taxes, and energy costs from a recent Forbes Magazine's survey entitled "The Best States for Business," an environmental policy ("green-capacity") rating by the Resource Renewal Institute, and government data on median income, income inequality, population size, and the number of Wal-Mart Supercenters relative to population. Then I fed the data into a statistical procedure called "principal component analysis" to produce a different kind of US "map":
Robocalling itself is simple: a computer calls your home phone and delivers a pre-recorded message about a candidate. They're annoying, sure, but it's legal and, according to one political strategist, "they represent the freedom of speech that our country was founded on.
"Perhaps, but Americans aren't up in arms about an annoyance, and this isn't about the First Amendment. People are angry, and demanding action, because the Republican Party appears to be using fraudulent and misleading calls to suppress the vote in at least 50 districts across the nation....
