The greatest fraud in voter history!

Hey, remember that stupid presidential debate? The one I blogged about here? Back when Joe the Douchesack and ACORN were all the rage?

In that post, I mocked McCain for saying this:

[ACORN] is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history ... maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.

Prophetic words indeed!

Of course, McCain wasn't the only jackass pushing the fear of voter fraud. It was all over the place. Crazy idiots everywhere were up in arms about ACORN. Because they just couldn't idly sit by and let voter registration destroy our country!

They were extra-upset in Ohio, where McCain's state campaign chairman subpoenaed people who did the unthinkable act of registering to vote on the same day that they actually voted! Here's what he had to say:

“If the secretary of state is listening and she has no evidence of voter fraud in Hamilton County, I'm telling you there is,” Deters said during a Monday press conference.

Deters said about 40 percent of those registration forms either lacked a proper address or could not be verified in the state’s database.

“During that five-day window, it was a free-for-all,” Deters said.

This Deters dude subpoenaed information on about 700 people. No doubt all guilty of horrible ACORN fraud!

So, how'd that all turn out?

A report Tuesday by a special prosecutor appointed to the investigation found that only one voter committed fraud.

A Connecticut man in town visiting his sister cast a ballot on Oct. 4 but later told officials what he had done.

He pleaded guilty Dec. 29 to attempted false voter registration and was sentenced to one year of probation, a $1,000 fine and 250 hours of community service.

Can the fabric of democracy survive? I sincerely doubt it!

John McCain needs my help!

A few weeks ago I went to this page on John McCain's website.

I was going to make a humorous sign that said "I am Joe Lieberman, the human embodiment of phlegm" or something like that. They were then supposed to email it to me, at which point I would chuckle softly to myself.

But since they're dirty liars, no sign ever came and I merely ended up on McCain's email list!

I remained on the mailing list, because some of the emails are hilarious. Also, they're not nearly as long or wordy as the ones from the Obama campaign. Because most McCain supporters are barely literate.

Today's was a little weird, though. They actually sent me a list of people and phone numbers and a script for calling people for GOTV purposes. Here's what it looked like (with the phone numbers obfuscated by me):


What the hell, McCain?

I can maybe see automatically sending ten strangers' names and phone numbers via email to people who actually volunteered to help the campaign. Or maybe even people who had donated money to it.

But they're sending these emails to me because I was trying to do something fun with their broken-ass website and had to use my email address. That's just screwed up. I don't want to know who these people are!

I realize no actual human beings want to do GOTV stuff for McCain, but to send this stuff out to everyone and beg them to help is just sad.

Also, doesn't McCain realize that the GOP is supposed to do voter suppression? It's the Democrats who actually try to get people to vote, the Republicans are supposed to try to keep them from voting. Poor confused man.

Anyway, if anyone wants to know of ten people in Ohio they can call and ask to go vote for Obama, let me know.

I know a house that needs egging

John McCain is a Socialist!

Here's a boring video of John McCain answering some idiot's question about progressive tax policies.



That's right, folks. John McCain is totally in favor of the redistribution of wealth. This is also true of every other politician in the country (except maybe Ron Paul, who is a moron). McCain even explicitly states that it's not Socialism!

As for Palin, she's said this:

“Alaska was conceding too much, and chipping away at our sovereignty. And Alaska—we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.”

"Share the wealth," huh? Socialist!

So why do McCain and Palin keep accusing Obama of being a Socialist for supporting progressive taxation, when they also support it (along with the vast majority of the population)?

Because they're filthy liars, of course. Duh.

Post-debate Whatever

Here is the single best thing to come out of last night's debate:


Awesome.

Most of the rest of it was babbling about "Joe the Plumber," plus the usual lies and obfuscations and pretty words that mean very little. The most exciting moment was when I really pissed off my friend's cat, who tried to maul me. He couldn't though, because he was declawed, and that must have been pretty frustrating. I feel bad about the whole thing. Sorry I was a dick to you, cat!

The results of the debate are pretty typical. If you already planned to vote for Obama, you still plan to do so. Ditto for McCain. If you're undecided at this point in the game you're probably so clueless you'll either miss the election entirely because you got confused about what month it is or you'll get lost trying to find your polling place and somehow drive into a lake. So who really cares what you think?

There are two things I want to mention, though. They both keep coming up, and they're both really aggravating.

This is a picture of an overhead projector:

This is a picture of the Adler Planetarium's Zeiss Mark VI projector, which John McCain has repeatedly referred to as an "overhead projector":


Yeah, pretty big difference there.

Here's a page where you can donate to help them renovate the Zeiss projector. Feel free to send them some money, by the way. Planetaria are awesome.

Anyway, know why they need a donation page? Because while money for the planetarium was in a budget proposed by Obama, it never passed. The Adler Planetarium got no money to update their 40 year old projector.

Yet McCain repeatedly brings it up. It's bad enough that he thinks planetaria are "foolishness" (that is actually the word he used). But in his whining about someone daring to try to fund science education, he can't even be bothered to tell the truth, which is that the funding never passed. Argh!

It's part of a weird pattern of Republicans hating astronomy, for reasons I can't fathom.

McCain hates planetaria, Nathan Bech hates telescopes, Sarah Palin presumably hates the concept of heliocentrism. I guess the astonomers have it a little easier than the biologists, at least. Hell, nearly 70% of Republicans reject evolution.

I wonder why America is falling behind the rest of the world in science.

The second thing that irritates me into calcifying a black pearl of fury is this quote from McCain about ACORN. This is basically the new Republican talking point/excuse for why McCain is going to lose.

[ACORN] is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history ... maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.

Oh my god what total bullshit that is! Forget Diebold and the largescale disenfranchisement of potentially millions of people, what's important is that a few people might have registered "Mickey Mouse" to vote. So now when Mickey Mouse shows up to vote he will destroy democracy!

Here's a good explanation of ACORN and "voter fraud". In a nutshell, yes there have been cases of false registrations. This was fraud against ACORN, not voter fraud. There's no evidence anyone ever voted under the false registrations, someone was just trying to make some extra cash by registering people who don't exist.

In almost all cases, it was ACORN itself which drew attention to the fraudulent registrations. Their only crime (and this is only a crime in the eyes of Republicans) is trying to register poor people to vote. That's not a reliable Republican demographic!

Making this all the more annoying is that I can pinpoint when I first heard a Republican shill badmouthing ACORN. It was on NPR, in a piece about voter suppression by the Michigan GOP.

The shill downplayed the Republican attempts at voter suppression while also claiming that ACORN commits voter fraud for the Democrats. It was probably on September 11th that I heard it, judging from the date on this NPR blog entry.

Apparently it took the Republicans about two weeks to get their talking points coordinated, because it wasn't until around the 27th that attacking ACORN really started to take off.



The accusations are obvious bullshit to anyone who actually bothers to look at the facts. They're just a smokescreen to try to divert attention from the well-sourced evidence of Republican voter suppression.

Sadly, debunking lies like this just tends to make people believe them more strongly. Cognitive dissonance is a terrible thing.

Anyway, Obama won the debate. Yay!


[Update 6:38 PM] Want to know more about what the hell is up with that picture up top? Go here and be enlightened!

Is McCain demented?

So, I had this whole long post written up about McCain and how I wonder if he's suffering from the early stages of dementia. I quoted from the diagnostic criteria and everything! But it was too long and too boring, so it's been scrapped (this is why I don't normally post all that often, I scrap a lot of posts).

Let's see if I can get the point across more simply.

First, watch this. It's only 13 seconds long.

Get that? Instead of saying "fellow Americans" he said "fellow prisoners."

Silly little misspeak, right? Anybody could do it.

But most people would notice it. There was no glimmer of recognition there. No correction. Not even a mangled "fellow prisonamericans" agglomeration. Still, no big deal. Everyone misspeaks from time to time.

Yes, it's humorous that he's talking about "standards of clarity and candor" while being decidedly unclear in his speech. But still, not a big deal!

Or could it be a symptom of impending dementia? Aphasia is quite common in those suffering from dementia.

Some other symptoms?

Well, you can find some here if you want.

For instance, "Personality changes occur, and the person may manifest changes that are the complete opposite from their previous personality."

Sure, McCain has reversed his stances on tax cuts, religious "agents of intolerance," and pretty much everything else he used to claim to stand for. He's gone from straight-talkin' maverick (which frankly was never really true, but let's just pretend) to bald-faced liar. And nary a day goes by that you don't hear someone say "The McCain of 2008 is a different person from the McCain of 2000."

But maybe that's all just politics, not dementia.

Here's another symptom: "Poor judgment and impulse control often go hand-in-hand."

Well, he did pick Sarah Palin. If that's not poor judgment, I don't know what is! There's also his massive gambling problem. But poor judgment and impulse control could just be part of his personality, not the result of his brain deteriorating!

"They may speak crudely, make lewd gestures and display their genitals."

Speaking crudely? Holy crap yeah he does that. But he's apparently done that for quite some time!

Thankfully I'm not aware of him showing off his genitals in public. I'm not going to search for that one though, because I'm scared of what I might find. Once again though, not necessarily dementia! He could just be a jerk! In fact, that's probably what he is!

"[T]heir speech can become stereotyped, slow, vague and filled with irrelevant details..."

Well yeah, though that applies even more to Palin than to McCain. And to some degree it applies to every politician. Not grounds for dementia, just resembles it!

"[T]here is memory loss for recent events... long-ago memories are retained and dwelled upon..."

Hmm... did you notice on the day he claimed that the "fundamentals" of the economy were strong how he started off with that claim in the morning and was saying basically the opposite by noon? Short-term memory loss? Nah, probably just lying.

As for long-ago memories, well of course he dwells on them! He hasn't done anything worthwhile in 40 years! Not dementia, just uselessness!

I'm not sure where forgetting how many homes you have falls in the short-term/long-term memory spectrum, so we'll just give him a pass on that.

"They may ... respond to situations inappropriately by crying, laughing, hostility, and immobility at inappropriate times."

I haven't seen McCain cry, though his creepy laugh certainly does pop up a lot. Also not sure about immobility. He's old, he doesn't move around that well.

But inappropriate hostility? Oh hell yes!

Still, seeing as his nickname as a young man was "McNasty" I'm inclined to think he's always had a bit of that hostility in him. Once more it's not proof of dementia, he's just an asshole!

"They may confabulate stories to make up for lost memories to conceal the degree of memory loss."

Like making up stories about sympathetic Christian captors?

But the cross story seems to have been ripped off from Solzhenitsen. Which would mean he's a plagiarist, not demented!

What does all this mean, taken together?

It doesn't mean that McCain suffers from dementia (even though I still suspect he's in the early stages). It simply means that his personality traits and the way he acts are already pretty in tune with people who do suffer from dementia. And that he's an impulsive, nasty, confused, unpredictable, lying asshole.

That's much better, isn't it?

At least he's not waving his genitals around yet.

Presidential Debate Liveblog!

Hey, it's a presidential debate between John "McNasty" McCain and Barack Hussein Obama! With commentary from me for some reason!

Will liveblogging it be fun? Probably yes for like the first 15 minutes, then I'll likely get annoyed and sick of the whole deal, but will keep going because I'm a masochist.

Complicating matters, I will be totally sober during the debate, as my body has recently decided that alcohol == headaches. This will make the debate remarkably less enjoyable, and I don't recommend that anyone follow my lead. In fact, I recommend you take a drink every time you hear the word "maverick." It will help dull the pain.

I'm going to be watching the debate online via Hulu, who will be using this as their first ever live stream! So maybe we'll get some awesome technical difficulties along the way and I can call the whole thing off. That would be pretty sweet.

Incidentally, tonight's moderator will be Tom Brokaw, NBC's liaison to the McCain campaign. Damn that liberal bias!

Okay, here we go!

8:45 - Yeah, it's 15 minutes early. I wanted to be ready. Also, I started watching the Tina Fey thingy on Hulu here and just discovered that at the end she says "maverick" in case you're playing a drinking game! I did not know that when I wrote that shit up above!
8:51 - Now I'm just watching this:Way to be exciting, Hulu!
8:58 - Okay, timer's over and it's beginning and I'm treated to several terrible commercials. I think they're just streaming whatever dumb shit is on NBC right now.
9:00 - Yes, we will be having "undecided voters" asking the questions this evening. No mention if they're illiterate too or just regular morons.
9:03 - Brokaw is getting all down on the economy. "We don't know where the bottom is." Hee.
9:03 - Some bald guy sitting in the bald section asks about bailing out bald people. Obama: "It's the Republicans' fault you bald guys are suffering."
9:05 - Obama has steps: 1) Fire fat cats 2) Reform system.
9:06 - McCain thinks it's all about energy independence and "keeping taxes low." The question was about bailing out normal bald guys, dude!
9:07 - Oh, the actual plan is buying everyone's house. That makes perfect sense.
9:08 - McCain will not appoint Tom Brokaw to be Secretary of the Treasury or whatever. That passes for humor. He also thinks the CEO of eBay "inspires trust and confidence."
9:10 - Obama likes Warren Buffet, then makes fun of McCain for thinking the fundamentals of the economy are sound.
9:11 - Some guy asks a question I missed because my dog is being obnoxious. McCain talks about Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, blaming Obama for encouraging them?
9:14 - Obama "McCain's all about deregulation and is a big fat liar but I'm trying to look dignified so I won't actually say that. But his campaign chair's a lobbyist for Fannie Mae, so nyah."
9:16 - Brokaw: "Are you saying the economy is going to get worse before it gets better?" Obama: "No, blah blah blah." WRONG.
9:17 - Same question to McCain, same basic answer but stutters a lot and is still trying to make up for 3 weeks ago by calling American workers the "fundamentals" of the economy.
9:18 - Some southern woman: "How can we trust either of you when both parties are responsible for this big clusterfuck we're in?" THANK YOU STUPID WOMAN FOR YOUR DEEPLY PROBING QUESTION.
9:20 - Barry: "Yeah, we suck. Here's a bunch of empty gibberish meant to placate you since you didn't bother to ask a real question."
9:21 - McNasty: "I'm a reformer! I love Joe Lieberman!"
9:23 - Oh my god he won't shut up.
9:24 - Brokaw, "Health care, energy, or entitlement reform, put them in order of importance!" This is a question?
And yes, I think Brokaw is drunk.
9:25 - McCain won't put them in order, he just says they're all important. Obama's cool with prioritizing, energy #1, health care #2, education #3.
Wait, was education a choice?
9:28 - Some old lady with AOL wants to know which animals the candidates will sacrifice to Ba'al.
9:30 - McCain wants to sacrifice earmarks. So he's killing a pig. Probably Babe.
Also says "We're not rifle shots here, we're Americans." which makes no damn sense.
9:30 - Obama: Remember 9/11? We really should have sacrificed back then instead of shopping like idiots. YES, BUT WHAT ANIMAL?

9:33 - Brokaw: "EVERYONE'S DRUNK!!!" This is somehow related to the economy.
9:34 - OMG Obama said some people are living "high on the hog." Why is he so sexist about Sarah Palin's lipstick?
9:35 - McCain's dementia kicks in: "Obama wants to nail Jello to the wall like Herbert Hoover... Protectionism... we'll get to that... he wants to increase taxes... small business are going to cut jobs... the economy is bad..." He moves his fist during the whole thing like his Jeopardy buzzer is broken.
9:37 - Brokaw won't let Obama respond to McCain's crazy, and starts making up questions. Brokaw asks about reforming Medicare and Social Security because the Greatest Generation is really concerned about them.
9:39 - Obama: "I'm going to ignore your dumbass question, Tom. Instead, here's all the ways McCain just lied to you."
9:40 - Man, McCain and Brokaw sure are chummy. McCain: "I'll answer your question." Then he doesn't.
9:42 - Someone assassinate Tom Brokaw now, please.
9:43 - Audience lady asks how we're going to move fast on environmental issues and "green jobs."
9:43 - McCain: "Seriously, I love Joe Lieberman. Also nuclear power!" Because environmentalists really love nuclear power.
9:45 - Obama sees the "green jobs" as being just like computers. Yes, we'll have a big bubble when everyone gets involved, which will then burst. Obama also likes nuclear power, but other stuff too.
9:47 - The splitscreen reveals the horror:
9:48 - Ooh, even better!
9:50 - Question: "Should healthcare be treated as a commodity?"
9:50 - Obama has mastered the "Yeah that sucks, here's another plan" response. "If you like what you have, keep it. If you don't have health insurance, you can have ours. Also, McCain's plan sucks." THIS IS TRUE.
9:53 - McCain thinks putting everything online will make healthcare fine. He wants you to go across state lines for health care. Like a common criminal fleeing the po-po's!
9:54 - McCain thinks people have health insurance that pays for hair transplants. "I might need one of those myself." Nobody laughs.
9:55 - Brokaw: "Health care: Privilege, right, or responsibility?" WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?
9:55 - McCain: "Responsibility, but we're not giving it to you. And Obama wants to fine you!!!"
9:56 - Obama says it should be a right and looks totally frustrated that everything McCain says about him is a lie. Then tries to correct the lies. Tough luck, Hopey, nobody cares about your dirty liberal facts!
9:57 - I hope you commenters are keeping up the cleverness. I can't read all your comments because this liveblogging is surprisingly difficult. You guys should take over.

9:59 - Foreign policy time. Some guy named Phil asks how economic stress will affect our nation's ability to be a peacemaker in the world. No $$$$ means no bullets!
10:00 - McCain: "we have gone to all four corners of the world and shed blood... so we are peacemakers." What?
10:01 - Obama goes off on how all our wars suck. McCain is scribbling something and looking grumpy that Obama doesn't love war as much as he does. Why do you hate war, Hopey?
10:03 - So the answer to Phil's question is "we're fucked!"
10:04 - Why is buttplug Brokaw asking questions? Stop breaking the rules, Tom!
Anyway, he asks when it's cool to go invade other countries. I think he's pissed that Hopey's down on war.
10:05 - Hopey says we'd stop Hitler. Smart move! Also, remarkably good ideas for Darfur.
10:06 - McNasty looks pissed and is saying "my friends" way too much. Stop raining on his war!
10:07 - Old white guy says we need "a cool hand" in charge. The most impulsive man on the planet, with a huge gambling problem, thinks he's a "cool hand"!
10:08 - To clarify, that was old white guy McCain, not old white guy Brokaw.
10:08 - "Should the US respect Pakistani sovereignity and not pursue Al Qaida there, or should we do them like we did Cambodia?" - some lady.
10:09 - Obama: "Yep, Bush sure fucked that one up pretty awful didn't he? Maybe if he wasn't such a dick we wouldn't have to even worry about that question!" Then, after a lot of talking, he says yeah we'll kill Bin Laden if the Pakistani government won't do it.
10:10 - McCain: "My hero is Teddy Roosevelt... talk softly, big stick.. Obama wants to talk to Pakistan before invading them..." I think he's developing a lisp.
10:12 - Finally, he ends with the exact same policy as Obama.
10:13 - Obama wants a followup and McCain gets pissy and wants his own. Obama's followup: "What the fuck, John McCain? Why do you keep lying about everything I say?"
10:14 - Oooh, Hopey brought up McNasty's "bomb-bomb-bomb Iran" song! This rebuttal right here is where Obama just won the debate.
10:15 - McCain's rebuttal to the rebuttal: "Not true." Then goes into a story about joking with a veteran that stops after "I was joking with a veteran."
10:17 - Brokaw asked some question about Afghanistan I wasn't paying attention to, and the responses are boring. Oh my god I'm going to murder everyone if this doesn't end soon.
10:18 - McCain is hung up on Obama not "admitting he's wrong about Iraq." Yeah, that's going to happen.
10:19 - Some dick on the internet wants to apply pressure to Russia on humanitarian issues without starting another Cold War. McCain takes this opportunity to say Putin is a big KGB apparatchik or whatever. This question is idiotic.
10:20 - Where are all the Code Pink protesters? There must be undecided Code Pink protesters, right?
10:21 - Obama talks about supporting Russia and ex-soviet republics to help keep from having problems in the first place. This is too nuanced! What about Putin's crazy KGB eyes?
10:23 - Brokaw: "Yes or No, is Russian under Putin an evil empire?"
10:24 - Obama: "it's nuanced, you ass!"
10:24 - McCain says "Maybe" and gets a laugh and then goes on for awhile saying nothing at all.
10:25 - Another bald dude asks if we'd wait for UN Security Council approval before defending Israel if Iran attacks Israel. He also wants to know if we would wait for approval from Papa Smurf before rescuing Brainy from Gargamel. He is clearly an undecided voter.
10:26 - McCain: "Hell yes! We'll bomb those fuckers all the time! I love these imaginary questions! Hey, did you see that episode of 24 where Jack Bauer tortured that guy?"
10:27 - Obama: "Maybe we should avoid that in the first place, dumbass. But yeah, if your totally imaginary scenario comes to pass we'll do what we need to do."
10:29 - Last question! From someone in New Hampshire:
"What don't you know and how will you learn it?"
THIS IS THE STUPIDEST QUESTION EVER. THANK YOU NEW HAMPSHIRE FOR SUCKING SO BAD.
10:30 - Obama "Whatever, dummy. Here's some stuff I do know." Then just stump speech for awhile. He does this stuff well. Change, hope, courage, sacrifice, new direction!
10:32 - McCain: "What I don't know is what's going to happen." Also where countries are on the map? Then to the stump speech.
10:33 - Fine, I'll say it for you guys: MAVERICK MAVERICK MAVERICK MAVERICK
10:34 - Oh thank god it's over. Hahaha they both just stood in front of Brokaw's teleprompter!

Okay, I have no clue what that debate was all about. Hey commenters, you rule!

I AM NEVER DOING THIS AGAIN.

A less good quote

From John McCain, here (pdf):

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

Yes, let's model healthcare after the banking industry. It's doing just great.

Update: What's Palin's take on healthcare? I was able to dig that up too.

Reporter: Do you agree with Senator McCain's attitudes towards health insurance deregulation?
Palin: In what respect, Charlie?
Reporter: My name's Frank.
Palin: I can see Russia from my house!

Why you shouldn't trust polls

People talk about polls a lot these days. Particularly presidential polls, where we're constantly told that Obama and McCain are "neck and neck."

This makes for more drama in the race, which journalists love. Nothing more boring than a runaway victory, that's for sure.

But is it really neck and neck? Maybe, but you really can't draw that conclusion from all these sucky-ass polls!

Remember the two days after the New Hampshire Democratic primary when everybody in the media suddenly realized that all their polls were incredibly wrong? Those were good days! Then they went right back to believing that their polls were valid and have been beating us over the head with them ever since.

Before I get into why the current polls are so incredibly flawed, let's talk about history a little. You've no doubt seen the famous picture of Harry Truman up there holding up a "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline after the 1948 election. This actually wasn't a polling error, it's just a nice picture. In fact, this screwup was due to a bad extrapolation of early voting returns. Which brings Fox News to mind, for some reason.

More relevant to what I'm talking about is the 1936 presidential race, in which it was at one point determined by the highly respected Literary Digest poll that Alf Landon would win in a landslide.

Remember president Landon? Of course not. FDR beat his brains in. Landon won Maine and Vermont and that's it, FDR got the other 98.5% of the electoral votes. In the popular vote, Roosevelt got 60.8% and Landon trailed almost 25 points behind with 36.5%, one of the biggest victories in modern history. Yikes!

What went wrong?

Well, Literary Digest (which was folded into Time magazine a couple of years later) used idiotic sampling procedures. They only polled their own readers, owners of registered automobiles, and people with telephones.

They did this during the Great Depression, of course. When the only people with cars and phones and with enough disposable income to subscribe to Literary Digest were far wealthier than the average citizen, and therefore more likely to vote Republican.

In modern terms, it would be like the Wall Street Journal running a poll that only counted their subscribers, people who drive Mercedes, and people who eat caviar at least once a week. Totally worthless.

Incidentally, George Gallup had his own poll of 5,000 random people that year and correctly predicted that FDR would win. And we haven't been able to shut up the Gallup polls ever since.

So, how does this relate to our current situation, when Gallup's more statistically-worthwhile polls are commonplace and pollsters have hopefully learned from their prior really stupid mistakes?

Simple: It all comes down to phones once again.

Most political polls are conducted by telephone. Many pollsters (but not all) just call land lines.

It shouldn't come as a shock to anyone that in the current presidential race Obama does much better with younger voters and McCain fares better with older voters. This is true not just of these two, but of their political parties. The young mostly vote for Democrats and the old mostly vote for Republicans. It's just the way it goes.

It also shouldn't come as a shock that young people are far more likely to be cell-only while old people love their landlines. Hello, sampling error!

Pew Research recently released a study looking at the cell phones vs landlines issue. It's pretty telling:

Let me particularly point you to the third part of that chart, where they look at Obama vs McCain preference.

Among the landline-only people, you get 46% for Obama and 41% for McCain. Okay, that's not far off what the other polls around this time showed. You get slightly more for Obama in the two groups that have both (landline-mostly and cell-mostly), but it's not really a significant difference.

But among the cell-only group (which is apparently just under 15% of the country) you get a massive shift. It goes up to 61% for Obama and drops to 32% for McCain. That's a big difference!

Yes, you'll also see that the cell-only group is less likely to be registered to vote (still time!) and also slightly less likely to actually vote (maybe not enough time?), but that's not unexpected among the relatively unreliable "youth vote" and is what candidates hope to address with GOTV campaigns.

Polling organizations are aware of these discrepancies, of course. Hell, Public Opinion Quarterly (which I assume most pollsters read) even had a whole issue devoted to the cell phone vs landline problem.

But it's not just about cell-phone only and landline-only people. It's a bit more complex.

The bigger polling firms (like Gallup) use random dialers that don't exclude cell phones. Let's take a look at the methods section of their most recent poll. It's pretty sparse, unfortunately:

For the Gallup Poll Daily tracking survey, Gallup is interviewing no fewer than 1,000 U.S. adults nationwide each day during 2008.

The general-election results are based on combined data from Aug. 24-26, 2008. For results based on this sample of 2,724 registered voters, the maximum margin of sampling error is ±2 percentage points.

Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones (for respondents with a land-line telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell-phone only).

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

Okay, it's good to have a large sample size, and that's a nice low margin of sampling error.

And as you can see, they do call people with cell phones. Though they don't mention how they know that it's cell-phone only. Do they ask anyone with a cell number if they have a landline and dump those people into the landline group? Maybe so. It's tough to know from this tiny little methods section.

The problem goes beyond cell-only and landline, though. It goes into a feature that's present on virtually every cell phone and only present on a relatively small (though growing) number of landlines: Caller ID.

I'd put Caller ID into the "practical difficulties in conducting surveys" category as mentioned in Gallup's disclaimer up there. For a large number of people (myself included), if a number comes up on the Caller ID that I don't recognize, I don't bother answering the phone. This is even more true if I'm out somewhere and my phone rings. Why should I take the time to answer some stranger's call when I know they can just leave me a message if it's important?

So who does answer the phone to talk to pollsters? Lonely people. People with nothing better to do. Invalids. People who are desperate to talk to someone -- anyone -- now that all their friends are dead.

In other words, old people.

Obviously it's not just old people talking to pollsters, but I'd be willing to bet good money that if you look at the median age of people who respond to telephone polling and compare it to the median age of voters, you're going to find at least a 5-10 year discrepancy.

According to RealClearPolitics.com, the likely median age of voters in the 2008 election will be about 44. I've been unable to find good data showing what the media age of responders to telephone polls is, but if anyone can point me to some I'd be mighty grateful.

Even if we give big firms like Gallup the benefit of the doubt and assume they go to great lengths to make their sample match the median age of the voting population (which they should if they want a truly representative sample), we still have a problem! They could do absolutely everything in their power to make the demographics of their sample match the electorate, but they can't do anything about people who just won't take a telephone poll. There are plenty of those people, and there's no reason to assume they have the same views as those who do respond to the polls.

A couple more problems with cell phones I'll just touch on...

First, unlike landlines, cell phones are not tied to one location. Your cellphone number can follow you around for years, so you can quite easily have a number that corresponds to another part of the country entirely.

This is a problem because polls rely on extrapolating your one point of data into a representation of a large number of people living in your area. If you live in Texas but have a Delaware phone number, you're counted as being from Delaware. Not such a big deal if you're doing a nationwide poll, but for anything more local than that then goodbye representative sample!

Second, cell phones generally don't represent a "household" like landlines do. This is perhaps a minor quibble, because polls probably shouldn't be counting the views of whoever answers a landline as being representative of anything beyond that individual, but it happens. My household has three phone numbers (two cells and a landline). Can that skew things? Yeah, but it's probably not huge.

Third, there are indeed still people who don't have a phone number they're reachable at. They may have a limited cell phone that they'll only use for outgoing calls. Or one of those cheapo convenience store phones that they certainly won't waste time talking to a pollster on. How do you think they vote? Probably not for Alf Landon!

There are plenty of problems with polling beyond the ones I've raised here, but I'm also not saying that polls are totally useless (indeed, I often refer to them even in this post). Tracking polls can show trends reasonably well. Standard polls can still give a rough idea of where things stand, and if this election weren't so divided by voter age maybe they'd even be reasonably accurate. And more focused polls can be quite good. But I'm talking about the presidential election here.

And since choice of candidate is divided so much by voter age in this election, most of the polls you're seeing now are likely to be wrong. Don't pay much attention to that +-2% margin of error, because there are so many other factors involved it's likely to be considerably higher.

Now, maybe I'm wrong about all this. Maybe the polls are spot-on and they've already done a flawless job correcting for all these factors. I guess we'll find out in November. But for now, don't read too much into the polls.

So yeah, Obama...

Well, the nearly meaningless Iowa caucus was last night, and we're left with Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee as the winners. Whoopedy doo!

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad Obama won. For that matter, I'm glad Edwards beat Clinton. But frankly, I'm not surprised by either of those outcomes.

Why not? Because the media are a bunch of fucking idiots. Hillary's entire "inevitable" status was created by them because they're stuck in an old way of thinking. We in Massachusetts, and especially in Fitchburg, should have already abandoned that way of thinking by now.

Allow me to explain...

Obama's victory was predictable if you watched the elections that gave us Deval Patrick and Lisa Wong, who both won by considerable margins. The commonalities are almost too numerous to mention, and I see no reason why the outcome should be any different.

I'm not talking about stuff like minority status here. It's insignificant as a factor in any of their victories. What I'm talking about is the two basic messages common to each of these candidates; "change" and "hope."

Most people aren't happy with the way the country (or the state, or the city) have been run of late. They want change, and they want intelligent change.

Kerry Healey didn't represent change, Tom Donnelly didn't represent change, and Hillary Clinton doesn't represent change. Patrick, Wong, and Obama did (or do). Whether that representation is accurate is an open question, but the perception is that they're at least agents of change. And not just any change, but a change that inspires people and engages them. That's perhaps the most important bit.

That's also the bit that involves "hope."

Now, hope is a tricky thing. Some (including myself) might say it's an empty word meaning nothing. You can't hope your way out of an unjust war, you can't hope your way to better healthcare, and you can't hope your way to a better government. But hope's still a powerful thing. If you don't have it, you don't get a lot done. You just sort of sit around being bummed out. So you sort of need hope.

And hope is what those three candidates give people. Which is no easy task with a populace as apathetic and jaded as ours. But it's pretty fucking powerful.

So here's what happens, and this is what the political pundits and media talking heads have yet to realize. All the elections in the coming year or so are going to have record turnout, and that turnout is going to push for the candidate who inspires hope and represents change.

Let's look at Obama vs Clinton for an example.

This is just anecdotal, but in my experience people who support Clinton are pretty lukewarm about her, and people who don't support her hate her fucking guts. So her supporters aren't necessarily passionate about going to support her, and those who don't support her are passionate about going to vote for someone else.

Obama has the opposite situation. People who support him are excited to do so. Those who don't support him don't seem to hate him, but sort of have a lukewarm (lukecold?) attitude towards him. There's not a lot of hate for Obama (unlike Clinton).

Anyway, Obama's motivated supporters definitely show up to vote for him. Clinton's haters show up to vote against her (and may well vote for Obama). Obama wins, Clinton loses.

This doesn't have a perfect analogue with the Patrick/Healey and Wong/Donnelly races, because I don't think people had the same hatred of Healey or Donnelly that they have for Clinton, they were just uninspired by them. Still, if you have one inspiring candidate and one boring milquetoast, the inspiring candidate is always going to win.

When it comes to Huckabee, it's sort of the same thing. Which is weird, but allow me to explain.

Willard "Mitt" Romney is the most boring piece of offal on the planet. Dull dull dull. He's the functional choice. The one with the nice hair and a lot of money. Seems like he'll win by the old-school thought.

But Huckabee excites people. Granted, the people he excites are batshit crazy. But it's the same deal as with the Democrats. He excites the crazy people while Willard just sort of appeals to the dullards. Hence, Huckabee won because the crazy idiots came out to vote in droves.

No idea if that win will carry over to other primaries (issues of money and so forth, plus Huck's general insanity do still matter a bit), but it should be a warning shot for Romney. Boring dudes don't win when the country wants change and vision!

Anyway, yeah. Vision is extremely important in a political leader. Hope and passion are very important to getting elected, and not so bad to have in a leader either.

And the media isn't going to get it yet again. What else is new?

I'll give my prediction, just in case you care. I've expressed this privately before the caucus, but might as well get it on the record in case I'm right...

For the Democrats, it comes down to Obama & Edwards, with Obama coming out on top. Hillary takes a couple of states, but that's it. Maybe an Obama/Edwards ticket in the general. Anyway, Obama wins president.

For the Republicans... well, I'm rooting for Huckabee just because he's so totally unelectable. It'll probably be Willard Romney though. Who will lose in the general election, just like he would have lost had he run for governor of Massachusetts again. McCain's the only Republican with a chance in hell of winning the presidency, but the guy doesn't have the money or support from the far-right base to get the nomination.

So there you have it. Feel free to make fun of me if I'm wrong.