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Barack Obama or John McCain


John Simkin

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I'm a bit busy today but I'll destroy your stuff on the ghost writing tomorrow.

A bit over due aren’t we?

I would also like Craig's views on the future of the Republican Party.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=13655

I expect Craig is busy selling his Halliburton shares.

No worries about the Republicans John, things swing right and then swing left, then back again and so forth. They will return to power in due course. Its the dims turn to muck things up and I'm sure they will do just that.

as noted during earlier times, I think you're a photog with much talent. I hope that talent finds many clients in far off places such as Georgia and GAWD forbid a place called California. :) The "dims" and President O'bama are gonna need your taxes (and mine I might add).

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I'm a bit busy today but I'll destroy your stuff on the ghost writing tomorrow.

A bit over due aren’t we?

What the problem? You in a hurry to get spanked?

You spank me? LOL whether literally or figuratively only in your wildest wettest dreams. As for the former sorry but I’m happily married and you’re not my type, don’t take it personally but it’s that pesky Y chromosome and I only enjoy being spanked by people with two X's.

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November 11 2008

Rahm Emanuel's History as a Warrior Democrat

Is Obama Screwing His Base with Rahm Emanuel Selection?

By Stephen Zunes

Obama has asked conservative Clinton vet Rahm Emanuel to be his chief of staff -- it's not a good sign for progressives.

I had really wanted to celebrate Barack Obama's remarkable victory for a day or so before becoming cynical again. I really did.

And yet, less than 24 hours after the first polls closed, the president-elect chose as his chief of staff -- perhaps the most powerful single position in any administration -- Rahm Emanuel, one of the most conservative Democratic members of Congress.

The chief of staff essentially acts as the president's gatekeeper, determining with whom he has access for advice and analysis. Obama is known as a good listener who has been open to hearing from and considering the perspectives of those on the Left as well as those with a more centrist to conservative perspective. How much access he will actually have as president to more progressive voices, however, is now seriously in question.

Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel is a member of the so-called New Democrat Coalition (NDC), of group of center-right pro-business Congressional Democrats affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Conference, which is dedicated to moving the Democratic Party away from its more liberal and progressive base. Numbering only 58 members out of 236 Democrats in the current House of Representatives, the NDC has worked closely with its Republican colleagues in pushing through and passing such legislation as those providing President Bush with "fast-track" trade authority in order to bypass efforts by labor, environmentalists and other public interest groups to promote fairer trade policy.

Emanuel began his political career as a senior adviser and chief fundraiser for the successful 1989 Chicago mayoral campaign of Richard M. Daley to seize back City Hall from reformists who had challenged the corrupt political machine of this father, Richard J. Daley. Emanuel later became a senior adviser to Bill Clinton at the White House from 1993 to 1998, serving as Assistant to the President for Political Affairs and then Senior Advisor to the President for Policy and Strategy, and was credited with playing a major role in shifting the Clinton administration's foreign and domestic policy agenda to the right. Emanuel was the single most important official involved in pushing through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the bill ending Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and Clinton's draconian crime bill, among other legislation.

Leaving the administration in 1998, Emanuel worked as an investment banker in Chicago, where he amassed an $18 million fortune in less than three years prior to being elected to Congress.

As head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee since 2004, Emanuel has promoted pro-war and pro-business center-right candidates against anti-war and pro-labor candidates in the primaries, pouring millions of dollars of donations from Democrats across the country into the campaigns of his favored conservative minions to defeat more progressive challengers.

Emanuel was a major supporter of the Iraq War resolution that authorized the invasion of Iraq. Indeed, he was the only one of nine Democratic members of Congress from Illinois who backed granting Bush this unprecedented authority to invade a country on the far side of the world that was no threat to the United States at the time. Even more disturbingly, when asked by Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" whether he would have voted to authorize the invasion "knowing that there are no weapons of mass destruction," Emanuel answered that he indeed would have done so, effectively acknowledging that his support for the war was not about national security, but about oil and empire. Not surprisingly, he has also voted with the Republicans in support of unconditional funding to continue the Iraq War and has consistently opposed efforts by other Democrats to set a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. occupation forces from that country and related Congressional efforts to end the war.

At a time of record budget deficits, Emanuel has been a passionate supporter of increased spending for the Pentagon and has resisted efforts by fellow Democrats to trim excesses in the Bush administration's bloated military budget. For example, he has repeatedly voted against amendments to cut funding for Bush's dangerously destabilizing missile defense and even voted against an amendment to identify unnecessary Pentagon spending by examining the need, relevance and cost of Cold War weapons systems designed to fight the former Soviet Union.

A major hawk regarding Iran, Emanuel has also voted against Democratic efforts to prevent the Bush administration from launching military action against that country and has joined the administration in exaggerated claims about Iran's alleged nuclear threat. He is not opposed to nuclear proliferation if it involves U.S. allies, however. Emanuel has consistently voted against a series of Democratic amendments that would have strengthened safeguards in the Bush administration's nuclear cooperation agreement with India to prevent U.S. assistance from supporting India's nuclear weapons program.

Emanuel is also a prominent hawk regarding Israel, attacking the Bush administration from the right for criticizing Israel's assassination policies and other human rights abuses. He was also a prominent supporter of Israel's 2006 attacks on Lebanon, even challenging the credibility of Amnesty International and other human rights groups that reported Israeli violations of international humanitarian law. Emanuel's father had emigrated from Israel in the 1950s, where he had been a member of the terrorist group Irgun, which had been responsible for a series of terrorist attacks against Palestinian and British civilians in mandatory Palestine during the 1940s. Emanuel himself served in a civilian capacity as a volunteer for the Israeli army in the early 1990s.

It is unclear how serious of a blow Obama's selection of Emanuel is to those who hoped that Obama might actually steer the country in a more progressive direction. It's easy to see it as nothing less than a slap in the face of the progressive anti-war elements of the party to whom Obama owes his election, particularly following his selection of Sen. Joe Biden as vice president. (See my articles "Biden's Foreign Policy 'Experience'" and "Biden, Iraq, and Obama's Betrayal.")

However, this does not necessarily mean that Obama as president will pursue nothing better than a Clintonesque center-right agenda. Someone with Obama's intelligence, knowledge and leadership qualities need not be unduly restricted by the influence of his chief of staff as less able presidents have. At the same time, this shocking appointment of Emanuel is illustrative of the need for the progressive base that brought him to power to not celebrate too long and to refocus our energies into pushing hard to ensure that the change Obama promised is something we really can believe in.

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco and serves as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.

Source: AlterNet http://votersforpeace.us/press/index.php?itemid=905

This article makes Emanuel sound like a Neocon with a "D" after his name.

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Here's an insightful article about the "change" our new president is bringing us:

bloomberg.com

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Excuse me? My claim was not misleading at all. It was completely factual. John on the othe hand got nearly EVERTHING wrong in his sysopsis of the events surrounding MIllican. Had it been an isolated incident it would have been a different matter but this a pattern for Simkin and he's getting called on it, with or without your approval.

Sure you used weasel words but I could say “It’s possible that Craig Lamson is child molestor” after all I only said it was "possible". You left out that there seeming is no basis for such claims and an expert said they were baseless.

Seeming? Is this your standard minimal level research talking, as is your standard, or have YOU actually studied the claim? Of course not, thats simply NOT how mrgoogle works.

What expert has done extensive testing and proclaimed the charges baseless. It was NOT Millican.

Yes “question have been raised” but by a person not really qualified to do so. I read Cashill's piece and it is weak to say the least he wrote:

You read Cashills piece WHEN? After getting your tit caught in the wringer? Before or after you FAILED to read the article on polls weighting by party id? Give us a break mrgoogle, you are all too tranparent. You attempt to raise questions all the time and you are not "really qualified to do so" Using your own logic lets dismiss mrgoogle..

No, I don’t have any qualifications in linguistics but cited two people who do. Cahill doesn’t have qualifications but wasn’t able to cite any linguists who backed his theory.

And yet you claim Cashills work to be false. Quite the standard fare for mrsuperficial. And you just might want to reconsider your your claims about Cashills qualfications and those who have reviewed his work on the Obama book. That is if you actually HAVE the intellectuial honesty and abililty to do some work beyond your standard cut and paste.
...preliminary QSUM analysis supports an Ayers-Obama link. Systems designer Ed Gold--with twenty years of high-level experience in image and signal processing, pattern recognition, and classifier design and implementation--volunteered to run a QSUM scan on multiple excerpts from both memoirs. “I have completed the analysis,” he wrote me, “and I think you will be pleased with the findings.” In assessing the signature of sample passages from Dreams, he found “a very strong match to all of the Ayers samples that I processed.”

But the value of QSUM or Cusum analysis seems questionable. According to John Olsson, author of Forensic Linguistics, a 269 page college/graduate textbook, it was developed by a biblical scholar rather than a linguist who “had no idea why [it] works”. It looks at among other things the frequency of “two- and three- lettered words…[and] vowel initialed words”. Olsson wrote:

However the key question is this: just what constitutes a discrepancy? How do we judge when we have a good fit? Clearly interpretation of such results will be subjective. Schils and de Haan (1995) expressed other concerns about Cusum, namely that there is ‘considerable intra-author variation’, which would preclude a reliable basis for inter-authorship discrimination, while Sanford et al (1994) found that the Cusum technique was ‘based on assumptions which at best are of limited reliability and are most likely completely false’. Canter and Chester (1997) conducted a detailed evaluation of a revised Cusum technique and found that ‘the weighted Cusum technique does not reliably discriminate between single- and multiple- authored texts’.

He concluded that Cusum was one of several techniques that “blatantly run counter to linguistic knowledge [and] should be treated with skepticism.”

And yet this 'expert' you quote (another cut and paste) has not reviewed the work of Cashill and others. When he does why not get back to us and we can look at HIS work and pass our personal judgement on it. Untill that point your 'cut and paste' is really meaningless in this context.

Pages 15 – 7

Wow, you found someone who disagrees. Imagine that. Is your source correct? We don't know because just like Cashill he offers only an opinion, and as we see with mrgoogle, opinions are like a--holes, most everyone has one. And yours, given here
"Yes “question have been raised” but by a person not really qualified to do so."
is just more conjecture.

The difference between Olsson and Cashill is that the former has demonstrable qualifications in the subject and the later doesn’t. Olssen teaches forensic science graduate level at a university in Nebraska, has two master’s degrees in linguistics and literally ‘wrote the book’ Forensic Linguistics Additionally he cited three papers, two of which were published the peer reviewed journal Forensic Linguistics, by a total of 8 linguists who said using Cusum to establish authorship is unreliable at best. Are Olsson and those he cites correct? Until you can similarly or more qualified experts defending Qusum we’ll have to assume they are.

Again the difference is that Olsson has not actually looked at the claims of Cashill AND THE OTHERS WHO HAVE ALSO REVIEWED Cashills claims. Cashill is a professional writer. He has the standing to question Obama's book. Cusum is only ONE of the methods used by Cashill to make his claims. Used ALONE it MIGHT be deemed as unreliable, however it was NOT used as the sole process was it? Just more drool from mrsuperficial.
I won’t go over all of Cashill’s strained analysis so let’s just look at what he thinks is his strongest evidence

Of course you wont, to do so will destroy your superficial position. What about the tweo books telling the same story, the story your SECOND 'expert' screwed up in his 'prelminary' tests? Strike two for mrsuperficial.

If there is any one paragraph in Dreams that has convinced me of Ayers' involvement it is this one, in which Obama describes the Black Nationalist message:

"A steady attack on the white race... served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair."

As a writer, especially in the pre-Google era of Dreams, I would never have used a metaphor as specific as "ballast" unless I knew exactly what I was talking about. Seaman Ayers most surely did.”

My god! Ivy League educated Obama who grew up in Hawaii used the word 'ballast' metaphorically, naah it couldn’t have been him, it must have been someone sea going experience!

Ivy league educated, yet he was offered a book contract with no published material( unless you want to count his "poems") in his record, and he FAILED TO DELIVER on that first contract, because he was unable to write. His next public document was porrly written and totally out of the style of "dreams". And in an amazing turn of events zerobama meets Ayers and THEN finally publishes DREAMS, written in a style notable for NOT being like Obamas published record and similar to the style of Ayers. Having a ghostwriter is not a crime, but an honest person would own up to it. Is Obama honest? What is even MORE amazing is that zerobama's new friend is know for helping writers. All in all quite an amazing tale for zeorbama, but one must not ask questions about the ONE, shall we, lest we be visited by mrgoogle, the self appointed arbiter of who is and is not "qualified" to ask questions.

The point was that Obama is likely to have been familiar with the word ‘balast’, I imagine every native speaker of English reading this thread is familiar with it. If Cashill’s best evidence is that he used it he has no case.
Google books turned up 682 books of or about poetry in which the word appears, of course the number of authors is lower because most get multiple hits but are we to assume all had maritime experience? On the 2nd page of hits I saw a familiar name, folk-rock singer Ani DeFranco. According to her Wikipedia bio which makes no reference to any nautical experience, she was born in, grew up in and moved back to Buffalo a city whose industrial waterfront has only recently been transformed into a recreational area. She also lived in NYC where boating except why working class residents in unfashionable districts of the “outer boroughs” is rare. Perhaps that poem was written by Ayers too, let’s count how many 2 – 3 letter words are in it!

mrgoogle in action once again and yet with all of this google prowess he can't find a single selection that shows weighting by party id happens in polls. Given this failure can we take ANYTHING he posts as truth? I suggest not. But lets look at his latest diatribe. He want to tell us that its "recreational boating" that might give one a background in things nautical. Never mind that commercial shipping was HUGE part of Buffalo for decades. Heaven forbid someone might pick up nautical phrases by living in a city with a huge commercial maritime presence. Lets call mrgoolge's "analysis" what it actually is...trash.

Buffalo was a major port because it was the terminus for the Eire Canal system which became obsolete when the St Lawrence Seaway was inaugurated in 1959, DiFanco was born in 1970. According to her Wiki bio and articles linked to it her mother and father were MIT graduates an architect and an engineer respectively. I doubt she spent much time hanging around the city’s then decrepit docks. Should could have picked the word up from a seafaring uncle or family friend but it’s more likely she simply learnt in school or through reading like everybody else. It’s not an obscure word.
I never said or implied that “expert has done
extensive
testing and proclaimed the charges baseless” just as John never or implied that Millican tested the entire text of “Dreams”, Those are your strawmen Millican wrote :

Well then it will be superficial testing for mrgooogle, which btw is an apt discriptor of his own body of work. .

It’s preliminary testing from a presumably neutral recognized expert versus extensive dabbling from an amateur with an ax to grid. I put more faith in the former

And yet your "neutral recognized expert" can't even seem to be able to follow a simple timeline! Lets review your sources. First one has not even studied the work in question. Second one has only done ver 'preliminary work" and cant even follow a timeline yet you deem him correct! And your "neutral" expert is on record as posting his OWN propaganda biased against those making these claims! I guess we now need a new name for you...mrgullible!
As for John his exact words:

"However, he decided to test it himself and found that the books were not written by the same man. The test results were then published"

Of course thats not what happened at all as Mr. Millicans own words attest. The facts are quite clear. John was less than honest in his post. And mrgoogle is less than honest in his defence of Simkin's dishonesty.

The other possibility is that he was simply mistaken. You’re only pointed out errors in my previous post in your imagination

No, John was simply posting HIS own brand of far left wing propaganda. The truth seems beyond him.

Some preliminary tests, using various data measures and a range of powerful statistical facilities that were recently added to Signature, indicated nothing that would give Obama any cause for concern. So I felt that any analysis I did would be far more likely to put an end to the story than to substantiate it, by providing objective data against what looked like partisan allegations.

[…]

Maybe one day I’ll go back and do the analysis in detail, but I doubt it. I would rather spend my time on serious research questions than on improbable theories proposed with negligible support.

I imagine you will quibble about the differences between describing a theory as “baseless” and “improbable…with negligible support” contradicted by “preliminary tests”. I also imagine insults will follow as well, you are too predictable and on the issue of Obama very much like Fetzer.

I'm guessing there were those in the day that thought that the theory of a round earth was baseless and improbable and was contradicted by "preliminary tests". mrgoogle is drunk on zerobama koolaid...and sorry but the predictable one is YOU!
Truthers use similar arguments. The truth is that men of science suspected long before Columbus that the world was spherical. Cashill is an amateur, Millican’s an expert and found his “theory” lacking. Sure Cashill has PhD in an unrelated field so do Fetzer, Griffin, Jones and Butz.
You want something undisputed? McCain was described as a "songbird" by AP (or perhaps it was Time or UPI) when he was a POW for his cooperation with the North Vietnamese propaganda effort. I'm not saying I would not have done the same but it puts a bit of a din on his claimed status of "war hero". Funny how the press which you complain is so tilted against him doesn't report this

Does not report it? What world are you livng in? Oh yes I forgot, you live in fantasyland. Hell McCain freely admits it!...and has done so on national televison Who is hiding what again?

Mrgoogle gets stuffed once again.

Very few of his media bios mention his "confession" none mention his being dubbed a "songbird". What percentage of the electorate would you guestimate is aware of this?

Really? So when he stood before the world at the GOP convention and announced to world that he was broken by the NV and confessed, no one heard him? No one in the news media reported this? No stories were written? Sheesh mrgoogle, your collective brain, www.google.com lists over 95,000 hits onthe search "John McCain songbird" , 790,000 hits to the search "John McCain confesses", and over 1.800,000 hits for the search "John McCain breaks under torture". In other words mrgoogle, once again we can see you are simply full of xxxxe.
You only get those numbers of hits when you search without quotes most aren’t about his confession, few if any that were, were MSM. Please provide a link to a mainstream source reporting that he made his confession on North Vietnamese radio

You are REALLY at a loss! McCain put his experiences in a BOOK! He was interviewed many times about his 'breaking" going back to a 60 minutes interview in 1997. He ran for president in 2000 and was the subject of intense media attention. He finally told the world ON NATIONAL TV during his 08 convention speech that he BROKE during captivity! Yet mrgullible wants us to look for some obscure reference to the word "songbird"! Perhaps we need yet a new name....mrredherring! Sheesh you do take the cake!
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YOu just can't stop spinning can you mrgoogle. I've no problem to admit my opinon of the party id was not born out by the actual election results,

Of course you don’t have much option other than to admit error

Some you win and some you don't. Admitting it part of being an adult. YOU however simply cant admit your errors.

I admitted that I was wrong about polls weighing for party ID and wrong about McInturff disputing party ID gap over 7% days before the elelction.

I gave you the sources for polls weighting by party id... the polling companies themself. That you STILL refuse to deal with this simple fact speaks volumes.

All polls or most at least ask voters about their party ID, only some of them used it for weighing. Until you posted the link to the “Mystery Pollster” blog you failed to produce any evidence it was used in weighing, even then you posted a link to the wrong essay (or wrong part of the essay if you prefer).

And once again you can't tell the truth. I pointed your FROM THE START to Rassmussen. Point of fact Rassmussen WEIGHTS BY PARTY ID. That you were too ignorant, to lazy or too superficial to look at the facts is YOUR problem As for your calims about the link...gee, are yo utoo lazy to read the last lines of the article...

Tomorrow, those who weight by exit polls.

9/29: Typo corrected above

[Continue with Why & How Pollsters Weight, Part II]

I guess we can chalk this one up to mrsuperficial being mrlazy...

And speaking of failure to admit error Mark Blumenthal (aka the Mystery Pollster) never said polls were weighed for party ID in the manner you alleged. Nor were you able offer an explanation as to why if party ID was so wrong Fox had numbers comparable with other polling groups. Even McIntuff accepted 9% in June and only days before election indicated he thought it had been under 8%. McCain’s pollster never claimed polls were off because of party ID weight rather he challenged the reliability of polls based on their party ID.

Strawmen mrlazy. I pointed you to an article that EXPLAINED the process you claim never existed. Thats it. McIntuff NEVER accepted 9%... that your PIPEDREAM! A for Fox, whats the problem? You think they were in the tank for McCain?

You wrote, ““The dim/rep/indie ratios are PRE-DETIRMINED before the pollster makes the first call. They throw the respondents so the results FIT their "special sauce" weighting. The answers you see in the question ARE A DIRECT RESULT of the oversampling of dims...as preplanned by the pollster prior to the start of the poll. Sheesh mrgoolge”

And for the poll that weight that is exactly correct. Try again mrignorant.

That was only half true at best because

1) only some polls weigh by party ID, and

I never said ALL polls ..in fact the opposite is true..I listed the EXACT polls that weight by party id. Way to go mrdisingenuous.

2) the way weighing is done wouldn’t oversample Democrats if anything, since some base their weighing on previous elections, they would undersample them. Polls that only weigh by average party ID over a several month period won’t shift the sample over the lon term and any shifts from poll to poll would be party neutral.

On ONE poll used prior elections and that is Zogby. Sadly for you, the early polls...the one that were used at the start of the discussion DID oversample dims. And at the time my position was based on my prediction that the dim/rep ratio would be similar to 04. Regardless, the polls that weight by party id pre-detirmine the dim/rep ratio PRIOR to making the first call (regardless of method) AND THROW AWAY the results that don't as true now as when I first wrote it REGARDLESS your your strawmen and spin.

In fact is just the standard mrgoogle tactic. And that is why it is you who is still STUFFED. You spin about me giving you the wrong link is bs as well.

You did give the wrong link. Normally when people give links they quote at least a snippet of the appropriate passage or link to a short page. I don’t think any one but you would think they provided proper citation for a claim when the info is found in parts 2 – 4 of a lengthy essay and they provided a link to part 1.

No, I gave you the RIGHT link to the WHOLE article. That your superficial work habitssshow you to be lazy is not my problem. The essaay was not lenthy by any means. It was CLEARLY labled as part one. Ther was a link to part two at the bottom of the article as well a s a link to a different article labled "weighting by party id" (imagine that!) A selected quote TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT( something YOU quite often) was of little value. What was of great value however was your other habit of doing superficial work and then doing a cut and paste...along with your standard claim of victory. Quite frankly you got pwned. The folly of Len Colby laid bare by your own shoddy methods.

I started you at the very beginning of the discussion, thnking maybe you mihgt actually be able to LEARN somthing. Instead in standard mrgoogle fashion you cut and paste the first few paragraphs you find and then claim victory. Stabdard mrgoogle stuff...suoerficial! Greatly diminishes any sense of victory you might feel because you STILL can't act in an intellectually honest manner.

You can call it superficial if you wish but ultimately I was correct and you ultimately were wrong. That is why you could only find sources that back parts of your theory. No one that you turned said that any polls weighed by party ID in a way that artificially increased Democrats.

You were correct? Now thats funny! Keep spinning and you will reach China!

To John in another post

And of course all you hard left wingers have already dismissed anyone who finds Obamas positions objectionable right wing bigots. So whats the point?

Perhaps it is your inability to coherently explain in your own words why exactly you find him so abhorrent. A long rant from a far-right nut claiming Obama has Marxist tendencies doesn't count.

Whats wrong? You cant refute the article I posted? I'm simply not going to waste my time refighting the last two years. Obama sucks. Thats my opinion. If you don't like it...fine.

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I'm a bit busy today but I'll destroy your stuff on the ghost writing tomorrow.

A bit over due aren’t we?

I would also like Craig's views on the future of the Republican Party.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=13655

I expect Craig is busy selling his Halliburton shares.

No worries about the Republicans John, things swing right and then swing left, then back again and so forth. They will return to power in due course. Its the dims turn to muck things up and I'm sure they will do just that.

as noted during earlier times, I think you're a photog with much talent. I hope that talent finds many clients in far off places such as Georgia and GAWD forbid a place called California. ;) The "dims" and President O'bama are gonna need your taxes (and mine I might add).

Thanks. The business climate is ..well..shall we say ...challenged. I had to regroup following the near shutdown of the entire marine and rv business. I'll take it where I find it now, but projects are few and far between. My rep handles many of the top auto shooters in the world and he can't find these guys work anywhere. The situation is bleak all over.

On the other hand have you bought a RED yet?

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I'm a bit busy today but I'll destroy your stuff on the ghost writing tomorrow.

A bit over due aren’t we?

I would also like Craig's views on the future of the Republican Party.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=13655

I expect Craig is busy selling his Halliburton shares.

No worries about the Republicans John, things swing right and then swing left, then back again and so forth. They will return to power in due course. Its the dims turn to muck things up and I'm sure they will do just that.

as noted during earlier times, I think you're a photog with much talent. I hope that talent finds many clients in far off places such as Georgia and GAWD forbid a place called California. :) The "dims" and President O'bama are gonna need your taxes (and mine I might add).

Thanks. The business climate is ..well..shall we say ...challenged. I had to regroup following the near shutdown of the entire marine and rv business. I'll take it where I find it now, but projects are few and far between. My rep handles many of the top auto shooters in the world and he can't find these guys work anywhere. The situation is bleak all over.

On the other hand have you bought a RED yet?

The cream always rises to the top.... you're there, so hang in.... As for the RED, I considered it, if I was shooting for the big screen (read prime lenses), I'd have it. Out here for handhelds: 4-Panasonic HVX-200's, P2 acquisition media, 24fps 1080i/720p (some cases 30p for DVD distribution, only) these days covers just about everything I need to deliver. I can get everything else by down rez'ing through Apple-Compressor.... At my age, as far as archiving/stock footage: I see no sense "re-purposing." We struggled, let them :)

Take care Craig, have a nice Thanksgiving and Holiday season... and hopefully, a profitable 2009

David Healy

Edited by David G. Healy
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No, I don’t have any qualifications in linguistics but cited two people who do. Cahill doesn’t have qualifications but wasn’t able to cite any linguists who backed his theory.

And yet you claim Cashills work to be false. Quite the standard fare for mrsuperficial. And you just might want to reconsider your your claims about Cashills qualfications and those who have reviewed his work on the Obama book. That is if you actually HAVE the intellectuial honesty and abililty to do some work beyond your standard cut and paste.

I didn’t say it was “false” I even said “The worst you could pin on him is that MAYBE he had a ghost written bio. But the evidence for that is quite weak unless yu think any Ivy Eductaed lawyer who grew up in Hawaii wasn't familier with the word balast or put faith in an authorship detection method rejected by numerous linguists. Even if true that puts him on the same scale as JFK and well, well below Bush II and Nixon.” Previously I said “seeming is no basis for such claims and an expert said they were baseless”. I make my position clearer to you. I think Cashill’s case is baseless or weak. He might be right but he hasn't come close to presenting evidence to reasonably support his claim.

...preliminary QSUM analysis supports an Ayers-Obama link. Systems designer Ed Gold--with twenty years of high-level experience in image and signal processing, pattern recognition, and classifier design and implementation--volunteered to run a QSUM scan on multiple excerpts from both memoirs. “I have completed the analysis,” he wrote me, “and I think you will be pleased with the findings.” In assessing the signature of sample passages from Dreams, he found “a very strong match to all of the Ayers samples that I processed.”

But the value of QSUM or Cusum analysis seems questionable. According to John Olsson, author of Forensic Linguistics, a 269 page college/graduate textbook, it was developed by a biblical scholar rather than a linguist who “had no idea why [it] works”. It looks at among other things the frequency of “two- and three- lettered words…[and] vowel initialed words”. Olsson wrote:

However the key question is this: just what constitutes a discrepancy? How do we judge when we have a good fit? Clearly interpretation of such results will be subjective. Schils and de Haan (1995) expressed other concerns about Cusum, namely that there is ‘considerable intra-author variation’, which would preclude a reliable basis for inter-authorship discrimination, while Sanford et al (1994) found that the Cusum technique was ‘based on assumptions which at best are of limited reliability and are most likely completely false’. Canter and Chester (1997) conducted a detailed evaluation of a revised Cusum technique and found that ‘the weighted Cusum technique does not reliably discriminate between single- and multiple- authored texts’.

He concluded that Cusum was one of several techniques that “blatantly run counter to linguistic knowledge [and] should be treated with skepticism.”

And yet this 'expert' you quote (another cut and paste) has not reviewed the work of Cashill and others. When he does why not get back to us and we can look at HIS work and pass our personal judgement on it. Untill that point your 'cut and paste' is really meaningless in this context.

Pages 15 – 7

Wow, you found someone who disagrees. Imagine that. Is your source correct? We don't know because just like Cashill he offers only an opinion, and as we see with mrgoogle, opinions are like a--holes, most everyone has one. And yours, given here
"Yes “question have been raised” but by a person not really qualified to do so."
is just more conjecture.

The difference between Olsson and Cashill is that the former has demonstrable qualifications in the subject and the later doesn’t. Olssen teaches forensic science graduate level at a university in Nebraska, has two master’s degrees in linguistics and literally ‘wrote the book’ Forensic Linguistics Additionally he cited three papers, two of which were published the peer reviewed journal Forensic Linguistics, by a total of 8 linguists who said using Cusum to establish authorship is unreliable at best. Are Olsson and those he cites correct? Until you can similarly or more qualified experts defending Qusum we’ll have to assume they are.

Again the difference is that Olsson has not actually looked at the claims of Cashill AND THE OTHERS WHO HAVE ALSO REVIEWED Cashills claims. Cashill is a professional writer. He has the standing to question Obama's book. Cusum is only ONE of the methods used by Cashill to make his claims. Used ALONE it MIGHT be deemed as unreliable, however it was NOT used as the sole process was it? Just more drool from mrsuperficial.

"And yet this 'expert' you quote (another cut and paste) has not reviewed the work of Cashill and others."/“Again the difference is that Olsson has not actually looked at the claims of Cashill AND THE OTHERS WHO HAVE ALSO REVIEWED Cashills claims”

I never said or implied that Olsson reviewed Cashill’s claims, I cited him to show that Qsum analysis is rejected by many if not most or even all forensic linguists. Unless he has neglected to tell us about it no linguists have backed Cashill’s theory. He only cited two “experts”

1) “Patrick Juola of Duquesne University” who Cashill said encouraged him “to do what you're already doing . . . good old-fashioned literary detective work.” But warned, “The accuracy [of authorship analysis.] simply isn't there” and “The repercussions of a technical error could be a disaster (in either direction).” . Hardly a ringing endorsement. Joula is a computer scientist and authorship analysis is only one of his many interests some of which involve linguistics some of which don’t. Most of his work in the field has involved co-authors.

2) “Systems designer Ed Gold--with twenty years of high-level experience in image and signal processing, pattern recognition, and classifier design and implementation”. But Gold isn’t a linguist and only did Cusum, a method dismissed by many experts. Even Cashill said “Like Juola, Gold recognized the limitations of the process and of his own resources.”

He continued that Gold “volunteered to make the raw data available to more established authorship authentication experts, and I will be happy to pass that data along”. Funny he seems to have ‘forgotten’ to “pass” Millican’s “data along”.so I gues that only applied to “experts” who backed him. So you think Cashill and Gold only approached Jouola and Millican? I imagine he (or they) approached a few more but were rebuffed.

“Cashill is a professional writer. He has the standing to question Obama's book”

Forensic linguistics is a very specialized field, By your logic Jack’s status as a “professional photographer” gives him “the standing to question” Apollo and 9/11 images.

“Cusum is only ONE of the methods used by Cashill to make his claims. Used ALONE it MIGHT be deemed as unreliable, however it was NOT used as the sole process was it?”

He did some other “analysis” based on 'reading level' and sentence length but Cashill wrote that Cusum was “a more reliable data-driven way to prove authorship”. Linguists say Cashill’s “more reliable” method is crap.
I won’t go over all of Cashill’s strained analysis so let’s just look at what he thinks is his strongest evidence

Of course you wont, to do so will destroy your superficial position. What about the tweo books telling the same story, the story your SECOND 'expert' screwed up in his 'prelminary' tests? Strike two for mrsuperficial.

I won’t because I don’t have unlimited time. Feel free to cite what you think is his most compelling evidence. I missed the part about “the tweo books telling the same story” or Milcan “screwing up in his 'prelminary' tests”
I never said or implied that “expert has done
extensive
testing and proclaimed the charges baseless” just as John never or implied that Millican tested the entire text of “Dreams”, Those are your strawmen Millican wrote :

Well then it will be superficial testing for mrgooogle, which btw is an apt discriptor of his own body of work. .

It’s preliminary testing from a presumably neutral recognized expert versus extensive dabbling from an amateur with an ax to grid. I put more faith in the former

And yet your "neutral recognized expert" can't even seem to be able to follow a simple timeline! Lets review your sources. First one has not even studied the work in question. Second one has only done ver 'preliminary work" and cant even follow a timeline yet you deem him correct! And your "neutral" expert is on record as posting his OWN propaganda biased against those making these claims! I guess we now need a new name for you...mrgullible!

I have no idea what you are talking about, what “simple timeline” was Millican unable to follow? What “propaganda” did he post? He simply said he did prelimary analysis and found Cashill’s claims, which he believed to be politically motivated, were baseless
As for John his exact words:

"However, he decided to test it himself and found that the books were not written by the same man. The test results were then published"

Of course thats not what happened at all as Mr. Millicans own words attest. The facts are quite clear. John was less than honest in his post. And mrgoogle is less than honest in his defence of Simkin's dishonesty.

The other possibility is that he was simply mistaken. You’re only pointed out errors in my previous post in your imagination

No, John was simply posting HIS own brand of far left wing propaganda. The truth seems beyond him.

You still have failed to offer evidence John KNOWINGLY posted false information rather than simply made an error. Were you dishonest every time you made a mistake?

I want to ask you about claims you made in a previous post:

"Ivy league educated, yet he was offered a book contract with no published material( unless you want to count his "poems") in his record, and he FAILED TO DELIVER on that first contract, because he was unable to write. His next public document was porrly written and totally out of the style of "dreams"."

What “public document” are you talking about?

"And in an amazing turn of events zerobama meets Ayers and THEN finally publishes DREAMS, written in a style notable for NOT being like Obamas published record and similar to the style of Ayers."

Who bedsides you, Cashill and PERHAPS Juola thinks the style of Dreams resembles Ayers’? Even Cashill said that “Dreams” wasn’t consistently stylish but rather that “the high style is intermittent” and that parts were “long-winded accounting of events and conversations, polished just well enough to pass muster.” He seems to believe only that Ayers or someone else “the best parts of Dreams.”. Some of my posts were better written then others leading Drago to speculate that they were written by different people. Do you think he is right or is it possible that the quality someone’s prose, especially someone with no training as a author can vary.

Ayers’ earlier writings were academic works or political polemics did any of them display the flourish of “Dreams” or “Fugitive Days”? I doubt they did because I find it hard to believe Cashill would not have looked at them for “evidence” to buttress his case but he didn’t mention their style.

"What is even MORE amazing is that zerobama's new friend is know for helping writers."

Please cite cases of Ayers “helping writers”.

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You want something undisputed? McCain was described as a "songbird" by AP (or perhaps it was Time or UPI) when he was a POW for his cooperation with the North Vietnamese propaganda effort. I'm not saying I would not have done the same but it puts a bit of a din on his claimed status of "war hero". Funny how the press which you complain is so tilted against him doesn't report this

Does not report it? What world are you livng in? Oh yes I forgot, you live in fantasyland. Hell McCain freely admits it!...and has done so on national televison Who is hiding what again?

Mrgoogle gets stuffed once again.

Very few of his media bios mention his "confession" none mention his being dubbed a "songbird". What percentage of the electorate would you guestimate is aware of this?

Really? So when he stood before the world at the GOP convention and announced to world that he was broken by the NV and confessed, no one heard him? No one in the news media reported this? No stories were written? Sheesh mrgoogle, your collective brain, www.google.com lists over 95,000 hits onthe search "John McCain songbird" , 790,000 hits to the search "John McCain confesses", and over 1.800,000 hits for the search "John McCain breaks under torture". In other words mrgoogle, once again we can see you are simply full of xxxxe.

You only get those numbers of hits when you search without quotes most aren’t about his confession, few if any that were, were MSM. Please provide a link to a mainstream source reporting that he made his confession on North Vietnamese radio

You are REALLY at a loss! McCain put his experiences in a BOOK! He was interviewed many times about his 'breaking" going back to a 60 minutes interview in 1997. He ran for president in 2000 and was the subject of intense media attention. He finally told the world ON NATIONAL TV during his 08 convention speech that he BROKE during captivity! Yet mrgullible wants us to look for some obscure reference to the word "songbird"! Perhaps we need yet a new name....mrredherring! Sheesh you do take the cake!

Most of the bios only mention that he wrote a confession note/letter few say that he read it over the radio. Once again I am not criticizing him but rather pointing out that this has not been reported by the media.

From another post -

CRAIG: And of course all you hard left wingers have already dismissed anyone who finds Obamas positions objectionable right wing bigots. So whats the point?

LEN: Perhaps it is your inability to coherently explain in your own words why exactly you find him so abhorrent. A long rant from a far-right nut claiming Obama has Marxist tendencies doesn't count.

CRAIG: Whats wrong? You cant refute the article I posted? I'm simply not going to waste my time refighting the last two years. Obama sucks. Thats my opinion. If you don't like it...fine.

I didn’t see anything to refute it was basically just long rant by a rightwing nut claiming Obama is a “Marxist”. If you want to highlight any facts from it that reflect poorly on Obama feel free

As for the polls, we’re going in circles so I’m letting the matter drop. You can choose to interpret this as ‘capitulation’ if you wish I doubt any else will.

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  • 3 years later...
You want something undisputed? McCain was described as a "songbird" by AP (or perhaps it was Time or UPI) when he was a POW for his cooperation with the North Vietnamese propaganda effort. I'm not saying I would not have done the same but it puts a bit of a din on his claimed status of "war hero". Funny how the press which you complain is so tilted against him doesn't report this

Does not report it? What world are you livng in? Oh yes I forgot, you live in fantasyland. Hell McCain freely admits it!...and has done so on national televison Who is hiding what again?

Mrgoogle gets stuffed once again.

Very few of his media bios mention his "confession" none mention his being dubbed a "songbird". What percentage of the electorate would you guestimate is aware of this?

Really? So when he stood before the world at the GOP convention and announced to world that he was broken by the NV and confessed, no one heard him? No one in the news media reported this? No stories were written? Sheesh mrgoogle, your collective brain, www.google.com lists over 95,000 hits onthe search "John McCain songbird" , 790,000 hits to the search "John McCain confesses", and over 1.800,000 hits for the search "John McCain breaks under torture". In other words mrgoogle, once again we can see you are simply full of xxxxe.

You only get those numbers of hits when you search without quotes most aren't about his confession, few if any that were, were MSM. Please provide a link to a mainstream source reporting that he made his confession on North Vietnamese radio

You are REALLY at a loss! McCain put his experiences in a BOOK! He was interviewed many times about his 'breaking" going back to a 60 minutes interview in 1997. He ran for president in 2000 and was the subject of intense media attention. He finally told the world ON NATIONAL TV during his 08 convention speech that he BROKE during captivity! Yet mrgullible wants us to look for some obscure reference to the word "songbird"! Perhaps we need yet a new name....mrredherring! Sheesh you do take the cake!

Most of the bios only mention that he wrote a confession note/letter few say that he read it over the radio. Once again I am not criticizing him but rather pointing out that this has not been reported by the media.

From another post -

CRAIG: And of course all you hard left wingers have already dismissed anyone who finds Obamas positions objectionable right wing bigots. So whats the point?

LEN: Perhaps it is your inability to coherently explain in your own words why exactly you find him so abhorrent. A long rant from a far-right nut claiming Obama has Marxist tendencies doesn't count.

CRAIG: Whats wrong? You cant refute the article I posted? I'm simply not going to waste my time refighting the last two years. Obama sucks. Thats my opinion. If you don't like it...fine.

I didn't see anything to refute it was basically just long rant by a rightwing nut claiming Obama is a "Marxist". If you want to highlight any facts from it that reflect poorly on Obama feel free

As for the polls, we're going in circles so I'm letting the matter drop. You can choose to interpret this as 'capitulation' if you wish I doubt any else will.

LOL watching Anderson Cooper, some Republicans are complaining the polls showing Obama with significant leads in many battleground states are distorted. Their main complaint was one of Craig's bugaboos 4 years back, the party ID of the ajusted sample. One problem with such theories is that, as was true 4 years ago, polls by pro-GOP Fox are showing pretty much the same thing. In Ohio for example Fox has him leading by more than the RCP average.

http://www.realclear...1860.html#polls

EDIT - Typos

Edited by Len Colby
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