Fine? Why Fine?

Hold Up?

This could be a major deal.

As I type this, a King County supervisor of absentee votes is admitting she falsified a report to make votes cast match with number of voters.  She's saying there are 800+ more votes cast than registered voters.  The margin of error appears to be greater than the margin of victory -- and to top it off -- there are 900 felon voters to enter into evidence.  The judge is admitting everything.

Via JYB who has some general background info if you're unfamiliar with the Washington Governor's mess-o-recounts.

1 More

Malkin links to this well-done and thorough poke at Conyers and Lampley on the stolen election situ.

It Was More Fun Yesterday

It is only for a sense of closure that I'm posting Byron York's (final?) reply to Lampley.

Dust up blogged here.

What Are The Odds?

Slublog is all over Jim Lampley for his post on "the biggest story of our lives" which he's posted as a contributor to The Huffington Post. The "biggest story" being the stolen 2004 election. Lampley's post is only a few paragraphs but each one is chock full o' moonbattiness and worth every minute to read it.

To summarize it: Lampley's a sports guy so he knows that Vegas oddsmakers are pretty much infallible. (Slublog points out the first thing that came to my mind too, it may not be the best timing to rely on oddsmakers based on a 50-1 shot winning the Kentucky Derby this weekend.) Working off the exit polls, the oddsmakers were liking Kerry big time as election day progressed. Therefore, the election was stolen. To quote:

And he [Kerry--Rob A.] most certainly was, at least if the votes had been fairly and legally counted. What happened instead was the biggest crime in the history of the nation, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil.

Lampley then goes on to explain "graduate level statistics" and pull the Karl-Rove-Is-An-Evil-Genius card.

Karl Rove isn't capable of conceiving and executing such a grandiose crime? Wake up. They did it.

This is fantastic. Go read the Slublog post for some debunking, if you need it.

I'll tell you what else the Vegas oddsmakers would have screwed up if they had lines on it: That with the stable of possible lunatics Huffington has on board (Cronkite, Maher, Reiner, Tina Brown, etc.) that frickin' Jim Lampley would be out of the gate with an early lead for "Most Insane Post."

[Lamp's mug taken from HBO.]

UPDATE

OTB looks at Lampley's description of the bookmakers.

UPDATE II

Slublog updated his post to include Rep. John Conyers' post thanking Lampley for getting on board with Conyers' hobby horse issue of the stolen election.

UPDATE III

Byron York rides in with a whomp on Lampley and Conyers.

This also confirms that it was a good move by Huffington to get contributors from across the political spectrum.

UPDATE IV

Can't. Stop. Updating. Post...

Malkin looks at 4,500 extra votes in Milwaukee. Which way did Wisconsin go, Lamp?

UPDATE V

This whole thing has escalated to official donnybrook status. Or a slapfight because Lamp ain't really bringin' it.

York's posting proves nothing. Neither, for that matter, does mine, but I think I know who is warmer. What is needed is for legitimate news media, whether old style or new age, to commit to the investigative process of getting to the bottom of what happened in November. At this point in 1973 Watergate was still a brewing story, Alexander Butterfield was months away from revealing to Senate investigators that there was an audio-taping system in the Oval Office. But the truth emerged. So too will it emerge here, if only the fourth estate will do its job.

Byron York won't scare me off. Not with lightweight stuff like that.

Currently, Lamp's pic has been replaced with Larry Merchant's. I don't know how long that will last. Back to Lampley.

And again, it looks like if you're looking for miscounted votes, you're better off checking in Wisconsin than Ohio where the WaPo's reporting. [UPDATE VI: Be sure to check CQ's update because the WaPo screwed up the numbers. Good thing we're not relying on them to straighten all this out.]

How's that for the "Fourth Estate," Lamp?

Advantage Blogs Again

One of the main factors cited in the latest post mortems on the exit polls is the age of the pollsters.

They suspected that there were more young people working as interviewers in 2004, which they said was another potential source of error.

This is a point that Rusty made right after the elections. 

Two weeks or so before the election I received a phone call from a colleague on the English faculty. She had been contacted by one of the firms that had been subcontracted to conduct the exit polling for the Associated Press. They wanted her to recruit three students to do exit polling in the local vicinity and as many students as she could get to travel to nearby counties. Why is this relevant? Because she is a junior English instructor. If the firm had simply looked up our university in the phone book I would think they would contact me--the senior member of the political science faculty and the specialist in American government. They did not. So why did they contact her? No idea. However, I will note that she is an activist in the Democratic Party, an open Kerry supporter, and involved in many liberal causes.

Later, I learned the firm contacted one other faculty member to recruit students--the director of Social Work. If you do not know what Social Work students are like think of a typical lefty student stereotype, add a dash of love for all things Great Society, and throw in more than a spoonful of feelings of entitlement and there you go. The firm recruited all of their workers to conduct polling from among this group.

All of the polling in 1/8 of our state was done by Social Work students. All of it. My state, if you must know, was said to be 'too close too call' according to the exit-polling data. In actuality, Bush won by 10 points.

[...]

This explains why the data were wrong. Students, possibly a lot of very liberal students, were hired for a day to run the exit polls. They tended to oversample other liberals--not in a huge way but enough to make a difference. These data were then turned over to the experts who aggregated them and then reported bad data to the major news outlets.

Rusty's post has a lot more that made a lot of sense to me back then. I've re-read it this morning and find the insights hold up.

[Post re-edited to include additional excerpts from Jawa's post.]

Point Missed

I think Michelle Malkin missed the larger point of the SNL skit she's referring to in this post. I'll concede that the jokes about Rush Limbaugh's drug problem that Drudge has up may be a little out of line, but taken as a whole the "Blue Christmas" (video link) skit was a rope-a-dope akin to Team America. In fact, I wrote most of this post Saturday night after I watched the skit, but I couldn't really complete it without a transcript. My intention was to point that the skit is actually more of a slam on the folks who keep referring to "Jesusland" than the Red States themselves. The audience reaction bears this out.

You can watch the video at the link but here's how I saw it:

The premise was that Santa Claus was going to only deliver presents to kids in Blue States, he was going to pass over the Red States, which he showed on a map to be renamed "Dumbf***istan." At this point the studio audience (I'm assuming it was the live audience and not canned) went wild with applause and there was even considerable whooping.

Santa's new schedule gives him time to kill so he goes to Chinatown to hang out with his friends, Al Franken, Natalie Merchant (?), Moby, and Margaret Cho. Santa jokes with them about how dumb everyone who voted for Bush are. The (unsuspecting) audience laughs right along. I thought some of it was funny.

Finally, Rudolph (no longer with a red nose, but a blue one) gets Santa and his new celebrity friends out of the restaurant to deliver the Blue States' toys. They come down the chimney of a young girl's house. She tells Santa he's early. He explains the whole passing over the Red States thing to her. This is when "TV Funhouse" goes Team America and flips the target from the Red States to the Blue States which we'll assume includes the audience.

The little girl is upset and doesn't understand. Santa et al explain that everyone in the Red States are bigots. "Everyone?" the little girls asks. Margaret Cho blurts out "They believe in God!" Santa continues how crazy it is that all those people believe in something that's not real. Franken breaks it down for the little girl, "Basically, they're idiots." The little girl starts to cry. "You calling people stupid for caring about God?" she says with a tear running down here cheek. This stuns Santa & Co. All Margaret Cho can muster is a "But they're bigots." "All of them?" the little girls asks, "I think you're a bigot, you're just as bad as the people you're mad at."

She continues to explain that "her Santa" wouldn't divide anyone into Red and Blue--labeling people is bad. This causes Moby to cry and Santa comes around and agrees with her. Franken doesn't back off and cites a study that shows that the amount of bigotry in the Red States is 3% higher than the Blue States. The girl starts to cry again.

The levels of irony at work here left the audience dizzy. Because when the credits rolled on the skit, instead of the raucous whooping that accompanied the earlier "Dumbf***istan" type jokes, there was only a spattering of applause. I think it must have slowly dawned on the audience that they (or at least those who think of the Red States as Jesusland) were the ultimate butt of the joke. "Ha, Ha, H--hey wait a minute?" I'd break it down to a skewering percentage as 70/30 anti-lefty.

Just like Team America.

Successless

Chris Suellentrop on the hamster wheel that is MoveOn.

The analogy to the Howard Dean campaign is irresistible: lots of money, lots of buzz, not a lot of votes. Beyond the presidential campaign, only four of the 26 candidates endorsed by MoveOn won their elections this year. Since its creation in 1998, it's hard to come up with a single significant political achievement that can be credited to MoveOn. It did nothing to stop the impeachment of President Clinton, the event that galvanized the group into existence. Nor could it stop the recall of California Gov. Gray Davis, the war in Iraq, congressional redistricting in Texas, or the election of President Bush. During the presidential campaign, MoveOn received its heaviest dose of publicity for a failure of sorts, when CBS rejected its proposed Super Bowl ad. Dean was mocked for placing a distant third in Iowa. MoveOn just keeps moving on.

The organization's name derives from its impeachment mantra—"censure and move on"—but it describes the group's ethos, too. Political campaigns are filled with busywork, to keep volunteers engaged with sign-painting and rally-going until the endpoint of Election Day. But MoveOn has confused the means with the ends. The group declares its actions to be a success when it organizes its members to call a congressional office every five minutes, or to circulate an e-mail, instead of when one of its political aims is achieved. MoveOn has turned itself into a perpetual motion machine, one that's great at inspiring its members to engage in the political version of treadmill running but never goes anywhere.

"They say they want to mobilize Democrats, but it doesn't seem like they have any infrastructure to do so," an aide to one of the Democratic presidential candidates told me. "It seems that they run ads to build name recognition, so they can raise money, so they can run more ads." If the goal is to energize the Democratic base, MoveOn isn't even succeeding at that, the aide complained. They're "just exciting a finite universe of hysterical liberals."

Delayed Reaction

Today, Charles Krauthammer explains the "moral values"/exit polls foul-up. Ultimately his dissection reveals the following:

If you pit group against group, the moral values class comes in dead last: war issues at 34 percent, economic issues variously described at 33 percent and moral values at 22 percent -- i.e., they are at least a third less salient than the others.

Today's November 12th. Blogger Andrew Coyne crunched these numbers on November 4th. I can't quite figure out Coyne's permalinks but here's my post with the relevant excerpts.

Advantage Blogosphere. (Hope you had the "over" on the 7 day spread.)

Woe Is Him

The Ol' Lady is a big fan of this guy so I couldn't wait to show here this one. [We're married now, I can call her that right?]

VINCENT D'Onofrio, the star of "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," passed out while shooting the hit TV series yesterday morning — prompting insiders to gossip that the actor is "losing it."

"Ever since John Kerry lost the election, [D'Onofrio] has lost his [bleep,]" said our on-set insider.

"He has been getting into fistfights with people, and when he passed out today, we all thought he was faking it. But then he insisted they call 911."

An ambulance raced to the Queens studio, where paramedics found nothing wrong with the gifted actor, who became a star in 1987 with his searing performance as a misfit Marine in "Full Metal Jacket."

Tensions on the "Criminal Intent" set are running high. "No one thinks Vincent will last for much longer," the insider said.

"He is so hard to work with — a total freak. He constantly complains about the scripts and has held up production a lot."

D'Onofrio, a big Kerry supporter, was said to be devastated over President Bush's re-election. "When PAGE SIX [last week] wrote about 'Law & Order' putting up signs forbidding political discussions on set, it was funny," our source said. "Those signs were put up because of [D'Onofrio]."

About a month before the election, D'Onofrio "insisted" on putting up anti-Bush posters and fliers, "and would attack anyone who disagreed with him," the spy added.

In response, "Law & Order" producers posted signs banning political discussions or anything else that would impede work on set, implying that D'Onofrio had held up taping of the show with his political zealotry.

D'Onofrio's co-stars, Kathryn Erbe, Jamey Sheridan and Courtney B. Vance, are said to be fed up with his antics.

"No one — and I do mean no one — talks to him anymore," the insider added.

Actually, I think his L&O character can be compelling, but it sounds like he was prone to this kind of behavior even prior to the Bush's re-election. Another in a long line, pushed over the edge. But at least, Cliffy's talking some sense.

Taking a Step Back

Found a new blog, Life In America As An Immigrant.

From day one I set foot in America, I knew the people of this country always have different opinions on everything. This is the nature of freedom and democracy, everybody fights for what he believes, and things all work out eventually. We are all patriots, but we don't have to agree on everything. Election is all about differences, and the better side wins out.

You want one voice? How about North Korea? It seems like everybody there is united behind their Great Leader?

America will be fine, not fundamentally different from every election held in the entire history of this young nation. Patriotism will do the job.

Well said, and you would hope, somewhat embarassing for the people who are actually considering secession.

Or they could just continue being big fucking babies.