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Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
Christine,

You have to be careful with how you describe electronic voting. In Michigan we use optical scan ballots, where you fill in a little bubble to say who you want to vote for and then you feed your ballot into a scanning machine and it records your vote, and the paper ballot is still around to be easily counted. It seems simple enough to me, I don't know why everyone doesn't do it. But it's still technically electronic voting since the votes are counted electronically.

I guess the alternative would be to have everything done on paper and counted by hand, which I guess would lead to smaller populations to be covered by each voting district and each precinct, but even then you still have to count on the honestly of the little old ladies running hte precinct and counting the votes. There is ALWAYS going to be opportunity for fraud. Optical scan ballots seem like the best way to go for me. Paper trail, easily understood, easily recounted, and few mistakes.

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Posts: 2392 | Registered: Sep 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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Speaking thereof, Nielsen Media Research just posted an updated analysis of presidential campaign advertising in the seven key swing states: Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. And, not surprisingly, Obama's advertising in those states continues to surpass the number of ad units run by his opponent, John McCain.

In those states, Obama placed 155 percent more ad units (62,022 vs. 24,273) than McCain between Oct. 6 and 26, Nielsen reports. Obama's advertising continues to be heaviest in Florida. He ran 18,909 ads there in the same time frame, outpacing McCain's 5,702 ads by 232 percent, Nielsen added. The data include national and local spots seen in these states, as well as syndicated advertising but do not include local cable ads.

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Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Christine:
As I live close to the Missouri border, I get a lot of Obama ads even though he's not a contestant in Kansas. Strangely, I know a lot of KS Obama supporters. My entire book club discovered last month that we're pro-Obama.

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Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Katarain:
And my family are all anti-Obama. They're not crazy about McCain, but will probably vote for him. I really don't understand it. They all ask me what Obama has done/accomplished, and being that I never meant to campaign for him, I can't answer the question in specifics.

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I'm still working on my mom. I figure my dad's a lost cause but I haven't given up hope on my mom yet. Last night I explained to her why his tax plan wasn't socialism. I don't know if she heard me or not, but I tried.

At least my parents are realists. They've decided next week to have an "Obama Victory Party" and invite over the neighbors. I was kind of confused until they explained that even if they didn't vote for him, his victory was pretty much guaranteed so they may as well get ready for it.

Posts: 2392 | Registered: Sep 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by lobo:
We haven't heard much this year about anyone "buying the presidency". I seem to remember it being a big deal when Bush won...

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Posts: 2715 | Registered: Apr 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Strider:
Joe the Plumber endorses McCain!

Well this changes everything! No other endorsement this year has really influenced my vote at all, but this one...this one is IT!

Joe the Plumber 2010! I mean...uhhh...McCain '08!

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Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004  |  IP: Logged | 

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"My youth and inexperience would definitely make me an awful president," said Obama, whose seven-minute misstep was further exacerbated when he called himself "no expert" on the economy. "To be perfectly honest, I'd be worried about putting me in charge of the most powerful military in the world because I'm not any good when it comes to making important decisions. Also, I'm not sure how much I care about keeping this great nation of ours safe."

"I'm an elitist, I hate Israel, and I want to lose the war in Iraq," Obama concluded, and then, seemingly unaware of the magnitude of his blunder, smiled, gave a thumbs-up to the stunned crowd, and urged his supporters to get out and vote on Nov. 4.

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Posts: 2911 | Registered: Aug 2001  |  IP: Logged | 

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Some people blame McCain's selection of Palin, but when I look at the trends on Pollster.com, Virginia specifically, I think the Ayres angle is what sunk us.

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Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999  |  IP: Logged | 

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From pooka:
Well, I can get my game face back by fantasizing about the Palin/Clinton matchup in 2012. It would be funny as heck.

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From Tom:
I like to think it was eight years of being constantly, consistently, egregiously wrong.

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Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
Palin will run for reelection in 2010 in Alaska (I think), and then I think she'll either position herself to run again by herself in 2016, or as a VP candidate again, but frankly I can't ever remember a potential VP being chosen to be a VP again after failing to win the first time.

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Originally posted by TomDavidson:
I like to think it was eight years of being constantly, consistently, egregiously wrong.

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Rub it in, why don't you.

Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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Honestly, if McCain loses, I don't even know about her own chances of winning re-election. For all that it's a red state, Alaska doesn't swing "right" so much as "crank". In the past twenty years they've had two Democrats, two Republicans, and an Independent. And I think a lot of the party brass are going to lay a lot of blame for McCain's loss on her doorstep.

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Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004  |  IP: Logged | 

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The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s researchers found that John McCain, over the six weeks since the Republican convention, got four times as many negative stories as positive ones. The study found six out of 10 McCain stories were negative.

What’s more, Obama had more than twice as many positive stories (36 percent) as McCain — and just half the percentage of negative (29 percent).

You call that balanced?

OK, let’s just get this over with: Yes, in the closing weeks of this election, John McCain and Sarah Palin are getting hosed in the press, and at Politico.

And, yes, based on a combined 35 years in the news business we’d take an educated guess — nothing so scientific as a Pew study — that Obama will win the votes of probably 80 percent or more of journalists covering the 2008 election. Most political journalists we know are centrists — instinctually skeptical of ideological zealotry — but with at least a mild liberal tilt to their thinking, particularly on social issues.

So what?

Before answering the question, indulge us in noting that the subject of ideological bias in the news media is a drag. The people who care about it typically come at the issue with scalding biases of their own. Any statement journalists make on the subject can and will be used against them. So the incentive is to make bland and guarded statements. Even honest ones, meanwhile, will tend to strike partisans as evasive or self-delusional.

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EDIT - I'm looking for the actual study and will add a link when I find, or probably someone will beat me to it

Posts: 1918 | Registered: Mar 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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A tale of media malpractice:

John McCain declares that lemons are purple. Barack Obama says, “Actually, they’re yellow.” McCain criticizes Obama for implying that lemons are cowardly.

Sarah Palin announces that she saved Alaska taxpayers $33 million by planting purple lemons. The crowd cheers wildly. Obama says “Lemons don’t grow in Alaska.” An Associated Press story is headlined “Candidates clash over color of lemons.” The story is considered “balanced” because it gives both sides equal coverage. The fact that lemons are actually yellow is mentioned in the fourteenth paragraph.

Rush Limbaugh asks, “How can somebody from Kenya presume to know what grows in Alaska?” The McCain campaign produces an ad accusing Obama of anti-citrus bias. It airs nonstop in Florida.

CNN commentators debate Obama’s denunciation of lemons for two days. An MSNBC poll asks “Does Barack Obama hate fruit?” The multiple-choice answers are “Yes”; “No, just lemons”; and “No, it’s politics as usual.”

McCain says that Palin saved taxpayers $43 million and Obama evidently doesn’t appreciate it. In a Gallup poll, 41 percent of voters say they trust Obama less following his gaffe about lemons.

McCain wins the election with 52 percent of the vote.

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Posts: 957 | Registered: Aug 2002  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by DarkKnight:
Why McCain is getting hosed in the press

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The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s researchers found that John McCain, over the six weeks since the Republican convention, got four times as many negative stories as positive ones. The study found six out of 10 McCain stories were negative.

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There have been moments in the general election when the one-sidedness of our site — when nearly every story was some variation on how poorly McCain was doing or how well Barack Obama was faring — has made us cringe.

As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.

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Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000  |  IP: Logged | 

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Personal note on "balance." I was part of a protest group outside the Supreme Court several years ago. There were also protesters from an opposing point of view. We outnumbered them by 3 or 4 to 1. Most pictures printed in the media were those that made it look like the numbers were equal.

The rolling eyes are a good intro into this latest news piece. I watched "Countdown" last night and actually found Olbermann's "special comment" interesting and not too over the top. It centered on the hay Palin is making about Obama allegedly being a "socialist." You can read about it at Raw Story, but the source for his material - accusing Palin of major hypocrisy - is from The New Yorker:

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For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.

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Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003  |  IP: Logged | 

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The rest of the article is worth reading, and adds a lot more depth than this excerpt you've chosen.

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Posts: 1918 | Registered: Mar 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by kmbboots:
I have a hard time believing that Sen. McCain believes half of what his campaign says.

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Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Lyrhawn:

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Originally posted by Sterling:

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Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
Ted Stevens is found guilty on all seven counts

Well, practically I have to imagine this gives the seat to Democrat Mark Begich.

Either that or Alaska will elect a convicted felon. That's assuming the judge gives him zero jail time, which frankly I imagine is likely.

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Oh, how I wish I could count on Alaskans being that sane. Heck, if they were, I might still live there.

(Er, nah. My wife really didn't want to live without seeing sunlight for five months of the year.)

There are actually people who will say with a straight face that Stevens has done great things for the State, that his convictions are a partisan witch hunt, and people aren't respecting others' right to do things the way they want to.

Bless that "frontier mentality" lunacy.

Begich is a good guy; I wish him luck.

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Begich is ahead by like a point, which is pretty much a tie. If this thing gives him a 2-3 point bump, that might be all he needs. He doesn't need a huge 10 point swing.

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Posts: 3617 | Registered: Dec 2001  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Orincoro:
Well, duh, I mean, Who believes their own lies? You can say them, and say you believe them, but they're still lies.

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Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000  |  IP: Logged | 

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This is *way* off topic for the thread at hand, but memory is plastic enough that it's actually completely possible to believe a lie of one's own making.

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Yep. And McCain wouldn't be lacking for company. If the history I've been reading is at all accurate, Thomas Jefferson was infamously capable of belieiving or blocking out memory of his own lies - and stunned when confronted with them.

There have been other, less illustrious, people in the presidency since Jefferson with the same capacity.

Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003  |  IP: Logged | 

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One question likely to be posed is whether these findings provide evidence that the news media are pro-Obama. Is there some element in these numbers that reflects a rooting by journalists for Obama and against McCain, unconscious or otherwise? The data do not provide conclusive answers. They do offer a strong suggestion that winning in politics begat winning coverage, thanks in part to the relentless tendency of the press to frame its coverage of national elections as running narratives about the relative position of the candidates in the polls and internal tactical maneuvering to alter those positions. Obama’s coverage was negative in tone when he was dropping in the polls, and became positive when he began to rise, and it was just so for McCain as well. Nor are these numbers different than what we have seen before. Obama’s numbers are similar to what we saw for John Kerry four years ago as he began rising in the polls, and McCain’s numbers are almost identical to what we saw eight years ago for Democrat Al Gore.

What the findings also reveal is the reinforcing—rather than press-generated—effects of media. We see a repeating pattern here in which the press first offers a stenographic account of candidate rhetoric and behavior, while also on the watch for misstatements and gaffes. Then, in a secondary reaction, it measures the political impact of what it has reported. This is magnified in particular during presidential races by the prevalence of polling and especially daily tracking. While this echo effect exists in all press coverage, it is far more intense in presidential elections, with the explosion of daily tracking polls, state polls, poll aggregation sites and the 24-hour cable debate over their implications. Even coverage of the candidate’s policy positions and rhetoric, our reading of these stories suggest, was tied to horse race and took on its cast.

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Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Noemon:

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Originally posted by Orincoro:
Well, duh, I mean, Who believes their own lies? You can say them, and say you believe them, but they're still lies.

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This is *way* off topic for the thread at hand, but memory is plastic enough that it's actually completely possible to believe a lie of one's own making.

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Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Lyrhawn:

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From pooka:
Well, I can get my game face back by fantasizing about the Palin/Clinton matchup in 2012. It would be funny as heck.

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Yeah that's certainly a fantasy. 2016 might be a little more realistic. Palin will run for reelection in 2010 in Alaska (I think), and then I think she'll either position herself to run again by herself in 2016, or as a VP candidate again, but frankly I can't ever remember a potential VP being chosen to be a VP again after failing to win the first time.

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Gov. Sarah Palin suggested that if the Republican ticket is defeated on Tuesday she expects to be a player in the next election four years from now, saying "I'm not doing this for naught."

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CNN's Dana Bash:
"I just got off the phone, Wolf, with a senior McCain adviser, and I read this person the quote, and I think it's fair to say that this person was speechless. There was a long pause, and I just heard a "Huh" on the other end of the phone.

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Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000  |  IP: Logged | 

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After the rally, we witnessed a near-street riot involving the exiting McCain crowd and two Cuban-American Obama supporters. Tony Garcia, 63, and Raul Sorando, 31, were suddenly surrounded by an angry mob. There is a moment in a crowd when something goes from mere yelling to a feeling of danger, and that's what we witnessed. As photographers and police raced to the scene, the crowd elevated from stable to fast-moving scrum, and the two men were surrounded on all sides as we raced to the circle.

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Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004  |  IP: Logged |