Barack Obama or John McCain

[Craig Lamson]

Funny that you suddenly seem to have forgotten the concept of margin of error. If you don’t count the states where the MoE was 0.3 he over and underperformed in an equal number of states. Youcontinue to ignore that we only have data on about half the primaries.

I"ve not forgeten the MOE at all. But lets take your numbers, zerOBAMA underperformed by 50%. Spin your way out of that one. Oh thats right ...you can't. If you think it gets better as you add more states, be my guest and add them.

You’re really don’t understand probability do you, applying a minimal MoE (+/- 0.3) he breaks even, doing better in half and worse in half. That is expected, except for the rare occasions when they are exactly right half the time a poll will under predict a candidate’s percentage and the other half they will over estimate it. If you apply a MoE of 1.5% or more he did better in more primaries that he did worse. Don’t forget that based on the data available on RCP it was McCain who underperformed more than he did better than expected when a MoE is applied.

Lets decode mrgooglespeak. It does not matter that zerobama did worse than projected in many of the races listed (the ACTUAL CLAIM I might add) because the over and under of polling really does not matter, since they miss it so often, but hey look McCaion does worse than expected ( a really poor attempt to shift the discussion AWAY from this failed position) even though (as stated by mrgoogle) these comparisons are meaningless.

If zero underperforms in the by 6% in the general election he is TOAST!

As I’m sure you are aware the election is not decided by popular vote it that were the case Gore would have been elected in 2000, Obama’s current RCP lead is 6.5% though

Wow! a stroke of GENIUS by mrgoogle, her understand the electorial college. Too bad he fails so bady at understanding weighting.

How do you think being an infantile ass advances you’re case? Hate to break it to you but party ID is not used in weighing not at least in the way you think. There are two types of weighing. The first is demographic it is used in both registered (RV) and likely voter (LV) polls, if a group (women, African-Americans etc) is over or under represented compared to census data, those respondents are weighted accordingly. The second is to determine likely voters and yes each company has its “secret sauce” to determine who is a LV. Generally this math works against Democrats because the people who tend to vote for them are less likely to go to the polls. That said most nonpartisan surveys including Fox, at least until recently, whether they be RV or LV had the gap in the 6 – 9 % range, a few had it in the double digits.

I knew if I gave you enough rope you would hang yourself and show just howe IGNORANT you in this instance. What you have done is show your relies are simply meaningless tripe and VERY poorly researched. Thanks for finally putting your foot firmly in your mouth.

Of couse some polls are weighted by party ID. The following polls weight by party ID. Rassmussen, Zogby, NBC/WSJ, TIPP, ABC, That party ID weighting happens in polling is BEYOND repute. And its NOT a new arrival to the scene as it have been a topic of discussion by Reps and dims and POLLSTERS for quite some time. Plenty of data on this at the mystery pollster and pollster.com as well as at the site for the polls.

http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/0...ow_pollste.html

The moral of this story , NEVER trust a word mrgoogle has to say....

But your theory that poll numbers are tweaked to have the respondent meet some predetermined target of party ID is nonsense. Cite me a source that says this is the case. Why would pro-GOP Fox go along with this? If it were true why do these numbers change? Let’s compare the numbers in May/June compared to now: CBS 14%/8%, Fox 7%/2%, Rasmussen 6.3%/7%, PEW 9%/15%.

Another STUPID mrgoogle statement. You are quite the piece of work...

My position is SPOT on, and heck you have not even figured out how a poll works yet,

Funny this coming from someone who has been unable to cite any evidence backing his theory.

UNWILLING, until now. You lose AGAIN!

Unable? No not at all. Jus UNWILLING to provide it for YOU. Besaides I offered the sources. That you have not looked is not my problem.

Unwilling is a lame excuse for unable, Jack tried pulling that one as well. You need to stop emulating your erstwhile adversaries’ worst habits

You look so silly mrgoogle, but then agin you have always looked quite silly....

Oh and I suggest you read the latest about party id by McCains chief pollster and the get back to us. That I haven't done your homework by no means suggest sI don't have the material, it just means I'm not interested in posting it for you. You ARE mrgoogle, and its NOT that hard to find. I'll be happy to accept your admisison of error then, that is if you have the stones....

Just as the last thing you posted from him didn’t prove your case, this one doesn’t either. He wrote:

“…what we're seeing in that last week or ten days is intensity increasing with some of the core Republican coalition, so that they are finally kicking in and going up, and as that happens we're seeing a closing in party identification. And I believe that party ID on election day in the exit polls, and then of course incorporate early voters is going to be in that kind of historic norm of minus three to minus five…CBS has got minus eight on party ID. FOX has got two points. Or my friend Andy Kohut at Pew has got a fifteen point party identification spread.”

http://campaignspot.nationalreview.com/pos...mUyNGY4YjAyZjc=

So he is saying that party ID, like poll numbers is narrowing not that the polls (except Pew perhaps) are wildly wrong, he has it pegged on election day plus early voters at 3 – 5% and CBS had it 10/25 – 29 at 8% not a very significant difference especially since he is arguing the number is shifting in the GOP’s favor thus he would presumably expect a higher advantage for the Dems 6 – 10 days before the election. But even if you shave 5% off Obama’s CBS lead he is still ahead by 6%. On 10/28 – 9 Fox had the party ID gap below what even he expects on 10/4 but even they have Obama +3%. No where does he back your ‘special sauce’ theory or anything remotely like it.

Well lets see, Ras has party id at -7.something, SEEbs has it at -8, Pew at -15 and Zogs is unknown unless you pay to see it. Sadly you can't even read. Of course he supports my special sauce theory. Read the rest of his statemet where he tells you that weighitng is a crap shoot this year.

You’re partially right for once I did miss where he said:

“I don't see how you have a poll showing party ID at minus 8, 12, 15, that's just not America, that's not America anywhere in the last generation and a half." But be said earlier in the same spiel he expected it to be 3 - 5% after having narrowed which means he believes it had been higher. This raises the question of what he thought is was, presumably in the 6 – 7 % range which is what Fox and Rasmussen said a few months ago. you claimed that Rasusen could not be believed because it had the gap at 6.3%. Six –seven percent is not that different from the 9% Newsweek had it at in a poll you claimed was unreliable due to the party ID as well gap,.

The guy backtracked a bit because in June he said he thought it was around 9%. But of course he had to change his tune, because being down 6 – 7 % on average 4 - 5 months before the election is one thing, still being down by that amount 4 – 5 days before election day is far more dire. He ignored two obvious reasons for party ID changing from its 1984 – 2004 norm of about 4% to 8 – 9%, 1] extreme dislike of Bush and 2] the huge number of new voters, even he said he expected an increase from about “104 million people” in 2004 to “130 135 million people” this time, that’s a 25 - 30% difference.

But I didn’t see him push anything like your ‘special sauce’ theory, that polls are weighed to fit preconceived notions of how many Democrats there are.

Other conservative commentators accept party ID gap numbers closer the one McInturff used to back than his current ones. Jim Geraghty from the arch-conservative National Review said he thought it would be around 6 – 7 % and said veteran conservative political commentator Michael Barrone thought it could go as high as 8 – 9%. Lets not forget that Fox had it at 7%.

http://campaignspot.nationalreview.com/pos...jllODAyNmUwNjE=

I love seeing you babbling like an idiot to spin thing to your advantage even though you don't have a clue. First McCains pollster NEVER said 9% was correct. We saw how you misread that one many posts ago. In fact his FIRST statement on what the dim/rep split HE though was correct was the 3-5. Strike one. And of course he knows about weighting by party, because unlike you, he actually understands the process. Stirke two.

IN fact thats a COMMON thread in MANY articles about the polling process this year. EACH POLLING CO. has its OWN special sauce. He backs my claim that many of the polls are grossly oversampling dims. That this BLOWS right over your head is no suprise to me. Whats even MORE funny you think 3 to 8 is "not a very significant difference " or even 5 to 8 "not a very significant difference"

Didn’t you just berate Raymond for supposedly changing one of your quotes? But now you feel free to take one out of context. I indicated that A 4% gap vs and 8% one is not that big or significant for 2 reasons

1) the pollster said “the number is shifting in the GOP’s favor thus he would presumably expect a higher advantage for the Dems” when the poll was taken

2) even if you corrected for the difference the poll would still show Obama 6% (or more) in front.

If you look just at the numbers for the gap 8 v. 4% might look big but the would come out to one poll coming up with lets say 36% Democrat, 36% independent 28% GOP and another saying that was 34% Democrats, 36% independent and 30% GOP

(these numbers were based on the earlier PEW survey which McInturff accepted as accurate)

First he NEVER accepted the pew poll as accurate, and second 4% is 5 MILLION VOTERS based on 135 million turnout. Only MORON would say this is not significant.

Your swearing by a theory you can't find any backing for reminds me of Fetzer desprately clinging to his EMF weapon theory for the Wellstone crash. He too cited credible sources that when you took a look didn't really back his position. He was also able to find crackpot sites [tinfoil hat (literally)/Nostodamous (sp?) sites, marijuana.com etc] that backed his theory you can't even do that.

Opps, you lose again...

I've found plenty of backing, you can find it too, providedyou have the ability to READ and COMPREHEND. The link for your enlightenment is www.google.com. Oh wait you have that one memorized, but sadly you can't figure out what to do with the material it provides.

Oh, yes the “I've found plenty of backing” but can’t be bothered to show it to you “defense”. Let’s try something less transparently BS.

Opps, you lose again....

I’m done with this unless you say something so absurd/offensive it can’t go unreplied, presumably by Tuesday night or Wednesday morning we’ll see.

Oh yea, you are done alright....

Edited November 3, 2008 by Craig Lamson

[John Simkin]

You REALLY should start telling the TRUTH John. You habit of telling FALSEHOODS has totally destroyed what bit of character your had left.

First off it was not the REPUBLICAN PARTY, it as a single person, Strike one. The McCamp was never involved and they REFUSED nothing Strike two. Millican never ran the full test on the book. Strike three. And the full test results were never published. Strike four. How do we know this? Its what Peter Millican tells us....

The offer to Millican was made by Robert Fox, a California businessman and brother-in-law of Chris Cannon, a Republican congressman from Utah. Of course, McCain did not directly contact Millican. Nor has he had the courage to make these ridiculous claims himself, he leaves that to people like you, who hate the idea that a black man can become president.

Read this article by Michael Tomasky about negative campaigning and its racist background:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/20...mocrats-tomasky

Emotions run hot on election eve, and few emotions are more a-boil right now than liberal paranoia. I hear it constantly: I don't care about the polls. I won't believe it until I see it. The Republicans stole 2000 and 2004, and they'll steal this one.

This dark pessimism is fortified by a corollary anxiety that each new revelation about Barack Obama will surely bring the whole enterprise crashing down and make middle Americans wake up and say to themselves, "Of course. What was I thinking? Back to McCain!"

This past weekend it was the story about Obama's auntie in Boston, a woman living in the US illegally for the last four years. But Zeituni Onyango is fading into the background, just another element of the farrago of last-minute titbits that make for future trivia questions. Her name may have been unlawfully leaked to the press by officials seeking to do Obama damage. But whatever the truth of that matter, the injury to Obama would appear to be minimal.

And yet, some liberals feared that this revelation would be the death knell. But in their terror, they have probably not stopped to ask themselves: if Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright and Rashid Khalidi - the Palestinian rights advocate with whom Obama is friendly and whom McCain smeared last week - didn't blow up this campaign, why would Onyango?

Face it, liberal paranoiacs: the swift-boating of Barack Obama clearly is not working. That it would work - indeed that it would define the contest - was the greatest fear of liberals everywhere as it became clear last spring that this somewhat unusual creature would carry the Democratic standard into battle this autumn. Many foresaw an October full of racial innuendo, Obama-Osama Freudian slips and worse.

Sure enough, we did see a lot of it. John McCain and Sarah Palin worked overtime to try to persuade Americans that Obama shared Ayers's radical world view. McCain's disgraceful comparison of Khalidi to a "neo-Nazi" - this about an American citizen by birth who teaches at an Ivy League university and has no record of extremism beyond that which can be conjured on rightwing websites on the basis of the odd out of context quote - was perhaps the lowest point of his whole campaign. And the Republicans have used race in subtle ways - the argument that Obama would take people's hard-earned tax dollars and hand them to idlers on "welfare" is a very old racist trope in the US.

Here in the 11th hour, we are hearing that Obama is unpatriotic and a friend to criminals; that he's not really a citizen of the US (disproved over the weekend by birth registrars in the state of Hawaii); and that his election will lead to a second Holocaust.

Yes, the voting is still a day away. But so far none of it has amounted to a single point in the polls that I can see, except perhaps in some southern states where tradition dies hard. Why? Three reasons.

First, the Obama team has responded quickly whenever such allegations have arisen. John Kerry's advisers let a fateful 15 days of swift-boating pass before they even addressed the issue. Obama's people haven't made that mistake. They've answered all charges and usually turned around and levelled a few charges of their own.

Second, the economic crisis really has fixed many voters' minds on more germane questions. Voters are more susceptible to character attacks when times are good and they don't have real bread-and-butter issues to worry about. But when times are tough, they actually do listen a little harder to discern which candidate seems to be more serious about addressing their problems.

The third reason is historical and is just my theory, but I think it's right. Broadly speaking, the American electorate consists of three chunks: committed conservatives, committed liberals and the uncommitted swing voters in the middle. When Ronald Reagan realigned American politics in 1980, he did so by forging a strong emotional alliance between the right and the middle. Centrist voters gave Republicans and conservatives the benefit of the doubt and looked upon Democrats and liberals, whom Reagan successfully discredited, with deep suspicion.

In that context, charges that Democrats weren't good Americans tended to stick. Whether it was Michael Dukakis's membership in the American Civil Liberties Union in 1988 or Kerry and the swift-boaters last time around, conservative allegations that Democrats seem alien and elitist and not fully American took hold with voters in the middle. They accepted terms of argument set by the Republicans.

But post-George Bush we're in a new context. That coalition of affinity that Reagan created between right and middle, Bush has put asunder. His failures have made the average, apolitical American as distrustful of conservatism as he or she once was of liberalism - indeed somewhat more so, since the memory of conservative failure is fresher in the mind. This is a new context. Many experts have yet to grasp it. Certain elements within the mainstream media haven't quite got it yet. And clearly some liberals just can't believe that it might be the case.

This is not to say that negative campaigning will disappear as of tomorrow. But it is to observe that political contexts change, and eras end. I'm still suspicious enough to use the conditional tense, but by Wednesday morning even the most paranoid liberals may be forced to accept that fact.

[Craig Lamson]

You REALLY should start telling the TRUTH John. You habit of telling FALSEHOODS has totally destroyed what bit of character your had left.

First off it was not the REPUBLICAN PARTY, it as a single person, Strike one. The McCamp was never involved and they REFUSED nothing Strike two. Millican never ran the full test on the book. Strike three. And the full test results were never published. Strike four. How do we know this? Its what Peter Millican tells us....

The offer to Millican was made by Robert Fox, a California businessman and brother-in-law of Chris Cannon, a Republican congressman from Utah. Of course, McCain did not directly contact Millican. Nor has he had the courage to make these ridiculous claims himself, he leaves that to people like you, who hate the idea that a black man can become president.

Read this article by Michael Tomasky about negative campaigning and its racist background:

You are a certified nutjob John. Telling the truth is beyond you. And you toss out the racism charge without any evidence to back it up other than your warped worldview. what a pity.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/20...mocrats-tomasky

Emotions run hot on election eve, and few emotions are more a-boil right now than liberal paranoia. I hear it constantly: I don't care about the polls. I won't believe it until I see it. The Republicans stole 2000 and 2004, and they'll steal this one.

This dark pessimism is fortified by a corollary anxiety that each new revelation about Barack Obama will surely bring the whole enterprise crashing down and make middle Americans wake up and say to themselves, "Of course. What was I thinking? Back to McCain!"

This past weekend it was the story about Obama's auntie in Boston, a woman living in the US illegally for the last four years. But Zeituni Onyango is fading into the background, just another element of the farrago of last-minute titbits that make for future trivia questions. Her name may have been unlawfully leaked to the press by officials seeking to do Obama damage. But whatever the truth of that matter, the injury to Obama would appear to be minimal.

And yet, some liberals feared that this revelation would be the death knell. But in their terror, they have probably not stopped to ask themselves: if Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright and Rashid Khalidi - the Palestinian rights advocate with whom Obama is friendly and whom McCain smeared last week - didn't blow up this campaign, why would Onyango?

Face it, liberal paranoiacs: the swift-boating of Barack Obama clearly is not working. That it would work - indeed that it would define the contest - was the greatest fear of liberals everywhere as it became clear last spring that this somewhat unusual creature would carry the Democratic standard into battle this autumn. Many foresaw an October full of racial innuendo, Obama-Osama Freudian slips and worse.

Sure enough, we did see a lot of it. John McCain and Sarah Palin worked overtime to try to persuade Americans that Obama shared Ayers's radical world view. McCain's disgraceful comparison of Khalidi to a "neo-Nazi" - this about an American citizen by birth who teaches at an Ivy League university and has no record of extremism beyond that which can be conjured on rightwing websites on the basis of the odd out of context quote - was perhaps the lowest point of his whole campaign. And the Republicans have used race in subtle ways - the argument that Obama would take people's hard-earned tax dollars and hand them to idlers on "welfare" is a very old racist trope in the US.

Here in the 11th hour, we are hearing that Obama is unpatriotic and a friend to criminals; that he's not really a citizen of the US (disproved over the weekend by birth registrars in the state of Hawaii); and that his election will lead to a second Holocaust.

Yes, the voting is still a day away. But so far none of it has amounted to a single point in the polls that I can see, except perhaps in some southern states where tradition dies hard. Why? Three reasons.

First, the Obama team has responded quickly whenever such allegations have arisen. John Kerry's advisers let a fateful 15 days of swift-boating pass before they even addressed the issue. Obama's people haven't made that mistake. They've answered all charges and usually turned around and levelled a few charges of their own.

Second, the economic crisis really has fixed many voters' minds on more germane questions. Voters are more susceptible to character attacks when times are good and they don't have real bread-and-butter issues to worry about. But when times are tough, they actually do listen a little harder to discern which candidate seems to be more serious about addressing their problems.

The third reason is historical and is just my theory, but I think it's right. Broadly speaking, the American electorate consists of three chunks: committed conservatives, committed liberals and the uncommitted swing voters in the middle. When Ronald Reagan realigned American politics in 1980, he did so by forging a strong emotional alliance between the right and the middle. Centrist voters gave Republicans and conservatives the benefit of the doubt and looked upon Democrats and liberals, whom Reagan successfully discredited, with deep suspicion.

In that context, charges that Democrats weren't good Americans tended to stick. Whether it was Michael Dukakis's membership in the American Civil Liberties Union in 1988 or Kerry and the swift-boaters last time around, conservative allegations that Democrats seem alien and elitist and not fully American took hold with voters in the middle. They accepted terms of argument set by the Republicans.

But post-George Bush we're in a new context. That coalition of affinity that Reagan created between right and middle, Bush has put asunder. His failures have made the average, apolitical American as distrustful of conservatism as he or she once was of liberalism - indeed somewhat more so, since the memory of conservative failure is fresher in the mind. This is a new context. Many experts have yet to grasp it. Certain elements within the mainstream media haven't quite got it yet. And clearly some liberals just can't believe that it might be the case.

This is not to say that negative campaigning will disappear as of tomorrow. But it is to observe that political contexts change, and eras end. I'm still suspicious enough to use the conditional tense, but by Wednesday morning even the most paranoid liberals may be forced to accept that fact.

[Len Colby]

I wrote, “I’m done with this unless you say something so absurd/offensive it can’t go unreplied”, it could be argued that your entire post qualified but I’ll stick to two statements that were especially absurd

“Of couse some polls are weighted by party ID. The following polls weight by party ID. Rassmussen, Zogby, NBC/WSJ, TIPP, ABC, That party ID weighting happens in polling is BEYOND repute. And its NOT a new arrival to the scene as it have been a topic of discussion by Reps and dims and POLLSTERS for quite some time. Plenty of data on this at the mystery pollster and pollster.com as well as at the site for the polls.

http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/0...ow_pollste.html

The moral of this story , NEVER trust a word mrgoogle has to say....”

How exactly did you derive that from your source? He wrote (bolding his, underling mine):

“Pollster strategies for weighting seem to fall into three general categories. I’ll take up the first tonight and discuss the others in subsequent posts over the next few days.

The first involves the classic strategy used by most of the major national media surveys, including CBS/New York Times, ABC/Washington Post,* Gallup/CNN/USA Today, Newsweek, Time, The Pew Research Center and the Annenberg National Election Survey among others. They begin by interviewing randomly selected adults in a random sample of telephone households. Even if they ultimately report results for only registered voters, they ask demographic questions of all adults. They then typically weight the results to match the estimates provided by the U.S. Census for gender, age, race education and usually by some geographic classification. This weighting eliminates any demographic bias, including chance variation due to sampling error.

The key point is that

they weight only by attributes

that are fixed at any given moment, easily described by respondents and

matched to bulletproof Census estimates

using language that typically replicates the Census questions.

Finally, to be clear,

none of these organizations weights by party!

Contrary to what I have seen written elsewhere neither CBS/New York Times, ABC/Washington Post,* Gallup/CNN/USA Today, Time, Newsweek, The Pew Research Center and nor the Annenberg National Election Survey weights their results by Party ID. [uPDATE: ABC News does weight its October tracking survey of likely voters by party (but not registerd voters and not surveys prior to October)”

If that was a little too long for you to take in at one time I’ll give you 2 of the highlights:

“…they weight only by attributes that are fixed at any given moment, easily described by respondents and matched to bulletproof Census estimates…”

“…none of these organizations weights by party!”

He didn’t specifically mention “Rassmussen, Zogby, NBC/WSJ, [or] TIPP” buy the are presumably included in the “among other” “major national media surveys” that he said didn’t “weight by party”.

He basically contradicted you about the ABC polls which he said only weighed “its October tracking survey of likely voters by party”. He didn’t say which party they weighed down but since they only did it to their like voter survey they presumably cut down the Dems because they historically are less likely to vote than Republicans.

I love seeing you babbling like an idiot to spin thing to your advantage even though you don't have a clue. First McCains pollster NEVER said 9% was correct. We saw how you misread that one many posts ago. In fact his FIRST statement on what the dim/rep split HE though was correct was the 3-5.

[…]

First he NEVER accepted the pew poll as accurate,

Am I mistaken in my assumption that you understand the words “show” and “useful”? He for the umpteenth time:

“the PEW Research Center released data from the first two months of 2008 which showed that across 5,566 interviews with registered voters, party ID is 27% Republican, 36% Democrat, and 37% Independent. Given the large sample size, that is a useful barometer by which to measure party identification”

I’ll give you a short simplified version “the PEW Research Center” interviewed “5,566…registered voters” in “the first two months of 2008 “ and “showed that” “27%” or respondants party IDed as “Republican” and “36% [as] Democrat… Given the large sample size, that is” probably a reliable “measure [of] party identification”

“HE though was correct was the 3-5”

He accepted 9% in mid-JUNE in late OCTOBER he said it would narrow to 3 – 5% by the time people actually voted and seemed to suggest it had never been higher than 7%. He never indicated in June that he did accept 9 – 10% or that he favored lower number.

...and second 4% is 5 MILLION VOTERS based on 135 million turnout. Only MORON would say this is not significant.

In June he calculated that a 7% shift in party ID would only boost McCain by 5%, presumably a 4% party ID shift would help the Hanoi Hilton “songbird” by about 3%, not enough to have shifted the results of the CBS poll within the MoE.

We're done till after election day.

[Len Colby]

And now it seems there is a question about who actually wrote "his" book Dreams of my Father" It's said it just might have been written on William Ayers dining room table.

This is one of the online dirty tricks that the Republicans have been using. What they will not tell you is that the Republican Party approached Dr Peter Millican, a professor at Oxford University. Millican has devised a computer software program that can detect when books and articles are by the same author. He was offered $10,000 to assess alleged similarities between Obama's Dreams from My Father, and Fugitive Days, a memoir by William Ayers. Millican insisted that the results of the test had to be made public, even if no link to Ayers was proved. The McCain camp refused and so Millican was not paid for the test. 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 and this has been reported in the British media. I suspect that Fox News has not carried the story.

You REALLY should start telling the TRUTH John. You habit of telling FALSEHOODS has totally destroyed what bit of character your had left.

Since John made his errors in replying to a misleading claim of yours there is no basis for your (presumablly) feigned outrage.

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.

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

[Craig Lamson]

I wrote, “I’m done with this unless you say something so absurd/offensive it can’t go unreplied”, it could be argued that your entire post qualified but I’ll stick to two statements that were especially absurd

“Of couse some polls are weighted by party ID. The following polls weight by party ID. Rassmussen, Zogby, NBC/WSJ, TIPP, ABC, That party ID weighting happens in polling is BEYOND repute. And its NOT a new arrival to the scene as it have been a topic of discussion by Reps and dims and POLLSTERS for quite some time. Plenty of data on this at the mystery pollster and pollster.com as well as at the site for the polls.

http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/0...ow_pollste.html

The moral of this story , NEVER trust a word mrgoogle has to say....”

How exactly did you derive that from your source? He wrote (bolding his, underling mine):

The answer, and something you seem to have a VERY hard time doing..I READ the entire article That includes parts 2 and 3..... In addition ALL the polls I listed as weighting by party id 8EXPLAIN THIS on their website. Can YOU get any more ignorant than this? I guess not. You are simply unbelievable. The fact remains that some polls are weighted by party even if you cant understand or read.

“Pollster strategies for weighting seem to fall into three general categories. I’ll take up the first tonight and discuss the others in subsequent posts over the next few days.

The first involves the classic strategy used by most of the major national media surveys, including CBS/New York Times, ABC/Washington Post,* Gallup/CNN/USA Today, Newsweek, Time, The Pew Research Center and the Annenberg National Election Survey among others. They begin by interviewing randomly selected adults in a random sample of telephone households. Even if they ultimately report results for only registered voters, they ask demographic questions of all adults. They then typically weight the results to match the estimates provided by the U.S. Census for gender, age, race education and usually by some geographic classification. This weighting eliminates any demographic bias, including chance variation due to sampling error.

The key point is that

they weight only by attributes

that are fixed at any given moment, easily described by respondents and

matched to bulletproof Census estimates

using language that typically replicates the Census questions.

Finally, to be clear,

none of these organizations weights by party!

Contrary to what I have seen written elsewhere neither CBS/New York Times, ABC/Washington Post,* Gallup/CNN/USA Today, Time, Newsweek, The Pew Research Center and nor the Annenberg National Election Survey weights their results by Party ID. [uPDATE: ABC News does weight its October tracking survey of likely voters by party (but not registerd voters and not surveys prior to October)”

If that was a little too long for you to take in at one time I’ll give you 2 of the highlights:

“…they weight only by attributes that are fixed at any given moment, easily described by respondents and matched to bulletproof Census estimates…”

“…none of these organizations weights by party!”

He didn’t specifically mention “Rassmussen, Zogby, NBC/WSJ, [or] TIPP” buy the are presumably included in the “among other” “major national media surveys” that he said didn’t “weight by party”.

He basically contradicted you about the ABC polls which he said only weighed “its October tracking survey of likely voters by party”. He didn’t say which party they weighed down but since they only did it to their like voter survey they presumably cut down the Dems because they historically are less likely to vote than Republicans.

You mrgoogle are a MORON!

I love seeing you babbling like an idiot to spin thing to your advantage even though you don't have a clue. First McCains pollster NEVER said 9% was correct. We saw how you misread that one many posts ago. In fact his FIRST statement on what the dim/rep split HE though was correct was the 3-5.

[…]

First he NEVER accepted the pew poll as accurate,

Am I mistaken in my assumption that you understand the words “show” and “useful”? He for the umpteenth time:

“the PEW Research Center released data from the first two months of 2008 which showed that across 5,566 interviews with registered voters, party ID is 27% Republican, 36% Democrat, and 37% Independent. Given the large sample size, that is a useful barometer by which to measure party identification”

Yes he said it was USEFUL. He never said it was CORRECT, despite of your continued babbling. In addition he goes to great length to show the HISTORICAL dim/rep split and tells us that even in 2006 when reps staved home in droves, the split was on +2 dims. As is so common we get the mrgoogle misinterpretation which he then claims is fact. Simply more mrgoogle ignorance on display!

I’ll give you a short simplified version “the PEW Research Center” interviewed “5,566…registered voters” in “the first two months of 2008 “ and “showed that” “27%” or respondants party IDed as “Republican” and “36% [as] Democrat… Given the large sample size, that is” probably a reliable “measure [of] party identification”

“HE though was correct was the 3-5”

He accepted 9% in mid-JUNE in late OCTOBER he said it would narrow to 3 – 5% by the time people actually voted and seemed to suggest it had never been higher than 7%. He never indicated in June that he did accept 9 – 10% or that he favored lower number.

Again he NEVER ACCEPTED ANYTHING. Thats a FIGMENT of mrgoogles fevered imagination.

...and second 4% is 5 MILLION VOTERS based on 135 million turnout. Only MORON would say this is not significant.

In June he calculated that a 7% shift in party ID would only boost McCain by 5%, presumably a 4% party ID shift would help the Hanoi Hilton “songbird” by about 3%, not enough to have shifted the results of the CBS poll within the MoE.

Actually he was talking about moving the numbers 10%. You can't even get this simple fact correct.

You are babbling again. None of this has ANYTHING to do with the June polls. Learn to stay on point, if your feeble mind will allow it.

We're done till after election day.

Yes, you are STILL done...thats a given.

[Craig Lamson]

And now it seems there is a question about who actually wrote "his" book Dreams of my Father" It's said it just might have been written on William Ayers dining room table.

This is one of the online dirty tricks that the Republicans have been using. What they will not tell you is that the Republican Party approached Dr Peter Millican, a professor at Oxford University. Millican has devised a computer software program that can detect when books and articles are by the same author. He was offered $10,000 to assess alleged similarities between Obama's Dreams from My Father, and Fugitive Days, a memoir by William Ayers. Millican insisted that the results of the test had to be made public, even if no link to Ayers was proved. The McCain camp refused and so Millican was not paid for the test. 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 and this has been reported in the British media. I suspect that Fox News has not carried the story.

You REALLY should start telling the TRUTH John. You habit of telling FALSEHOODS has totally destroyed what bit of character your had left.

Since John made his errors in replying to a misleading claim of yours there is no basis for your (presumablly) feigned outrage.

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.

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.

[J. Raymond Carroll]

Oh Magoo, you've done it again!

Is Joe the Bomber really the reason for Magoo's BIG election-eve comeback?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu...ress=385x232809

(Reminds everyone that once upon a time Magoo was a pilot who slaughtered and terrorized people by dropping high-explosive bombs on their villages).

Go Magoo!

[Steve Mcdonagh]

Barack Obama Beats John McCain - Official Result Just In

I thought this might lighten the mood around here since the election is only a matter of hours away, and very little either candidate does now is likely to change anything.

Steve

PS: The result was fair.

[John Simkin]

If you are asked to vote on an electronic machine demand a paper ballot instead.

If you are denied a paper ballot, make sure the machine is not visibly switching your vote [though it can despite what it shows you].

If you are told you are not on the roll of registered voters, demand a provisional ballot and follow-up after, to make sure you were counted. Do NOT leave without voting.

Report any irregularities you note to both the County authorities present and any lawyers present [some will be on hand in larger polling places for this purpose]. Bring video and digital cameras to record any 'funny business'

Via the websites above, there are phone numbers you can call with a mobile phone from inside the voting booth to help with problems. Come prepared with mobile phone, digital camera, and phone number for your area or to some of the nationwide vote fraud watchgroups. Two are 1-866-OUR-VOTE and 1-866-MY-VOTE-1. There are others - some local.

Overtly vote flipping machines should be demanded to be REMOVED immediately from service and impounded/sealed! Don't let the officials or pollworkers just 'fix' it!

Don't let the secret government steal your vote again!

It is amazing that in a so-called democracy you have to take such precautions.

Last night I watched Recount:

http://www.imdb.com/media/rm3653605120/tt1000771

It is a factual account of how the Supreme Court came to Bush's aide in stealing the 2000 election.

[J. Raymond Carroll]

Looking inside the crosstabs, Obama’s advantage is largely based on his overwhelming success

with African Americans (winning them 90%-3%),

Latinos (68%-27%),

and 18 to 34 year olds (59%-38%).

It's about as solid of a three-legged support stool as any candidate could ask for.

Obama also wins independents (48%-38%),

blue-collar voters (51%-44%),

suburban voters (49%-44%),

and Catholics (49%-46%).

McCain, meanwhile, has the advantage among evangelicals (78%-19%),

those 65 and older (53%-40%),

white men (54%-42%),

and white women (48%-47%).

McCain led among white women up to yesterday, but then Obama's grandmother died, so expect a pro-Obama surge among white women voters today.

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/200...03/1628887.aspx

[Len Colby]

And now it seems there is a question about who actually wrote "his" book Dreams of my Father" It's said it just might have been written on William Ayers dining room table.

This is one of the online dirty tricks that the Republicans have been using. What they will not tell you is that the Republican Party approached Dr Peter Millican, a professor at Oxford University. Millican has devised a computer software program that can detect when books and articles are by the same author. He was offered $10,000 to assess alleged similarities between Obama's Dreams from My Father, and Fugitive Days, a memoir by William Ayers. Millican insisted that the results of the test had to be made public, even if no link to Ayers was proved. The McCain camp refused and so Millican was not paid for the test. 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 and this has been reported in the British media. I suspect that Fox News has not carried the story.

You REALLY should start telling the TRUTH John. You habit of telling FALSEHOODS has totally destroyed what bit of character your had left.

Since John made his errors in replying to a misleading claim of yours there is no basis for your (presumablly) feigned outrage.

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:

...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.”

Pages 15 – 7

http://books.google.com/books?id=i3399LFSz...result#PPA16,M1

I won’t go over all of Cashill’s strained analysis so let’s just look at what he thinks is his strongest evidence

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!

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!

http://books.google.com/books?as_q=ballast...y=&as_isbn=

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ani_DiFranco

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 :

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.

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?

[Len Colby]

As someone else pointed out the last time the Republicans won the White House without Nixon or a Bush on the ticket was 1928 everything indicates that record won’t be3 broken today. Obama only needs to carry the sates where his lead is on average 6.8%, no recent polls show him behind in any of them

Edited November 4, 2008 by Len Colby

[J. Raymond Carroll]

Doopety-Doo

Edited November 4, 2008 by J. Raymond Carroll

[J. Raymond Carroll]

As Dixville Notch goes, so goes the nation?

And in tiny Dixville Notch, N.H., which casts its ballots just after midnight, Mr. Obama won 15 votes to Mr. McCain’s 6. President Bush won the vote there in 2004.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/us/polit...amp;oref=slogin