Daily Archives: 13 Oct 08

Noonan, York, Toobin And Others Take Aim At McCain

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US Senator Barack Obama campaigning in New Hampshire“With 22 days left before the voters hit the polls, conservative pundits and media commentators are scratching their heads over the lack of direction – indeed, the near schizophrenic judgment – of the McCain campaign.

Appearing at the Time Warner Summit conference on the 2008 election, a host of prominent electoral observers were all bearish on the Arizona Republican’s presidential ambitions. Not one panelist took the chance to defend the Senator’s choice of Sarah Palin as vice president. Others simply saw death by electoral numbers…

‘Obama seems older in a way,’ said [Peggy Noonan]. ‘McCain has seemed herky-jerky. Obama has seemed like the older, steadier fellow since the economic crisis began.'” (HuffPo)

Paul Krugman’s ‘Baby-sitting the economy’

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Princeton Profess...

“Paul Krugman, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences today for his work on international trade patterns, was the lead economics columnist for Slate from the magazine’s launch in 1996 to 1999, when he became a columnist for the New York Times. His ‘Dismal Science’ column covered everything from puzzling economics of ticket scalping to the tenacity of supply-side economics in presidential campaigns. One particular favorite, which was included in Slate‘s 10th-anniversary anthology, is ‘Baby-Sitting the Economy,’ a column about what a failed baby-sitting cooperative in Washington, D.C., can teach us about a global economic crisis. The article is reprinted below.”
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Christopher Hitchens Endorses Obama

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McCain lacks the character and temperament to be president. And Palin is simply a disgrace.

“I used to nod wisely when people said: “Let’s discuss issues rather than personalities.” It seemed so obvious that in politics an issue was an issue and a personality was a personality, and that the more one could separate the two, the more serious one was. After all, in a debate on serious issues, any mention of the opponent’s personality would be ad hominem at best and at worst would stoop as low as ad feminam.

…I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that “issue” I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience. With McCain, the “experience” is subject to sharply diminishing returns, as is the rest of him, and with Palin the very word itself is a sick joke. One only wishes that the election could be over now and a proper and dignified verdict rendered, so as to spare democracy and civility the degradation to which they look like being subjected in the remaining days of a low, dishonest campaign.” (Slate)

Mysterious New ‘Dark Flow’ Discovered in Space

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“As if the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy weren’t vexing enough, another baffling cosmic puzzle has been discovered.

Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can’t be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon ‘dark flow.’

The stuff that’s pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude.” (space.com)

How McCain Will Steal the Election from Obama (Sort Of)

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Members of the Associa...

Tom Matzzie: “Imagine an election where one of the participants calls foul. Investigations are launched or at least called for. Prosecutors raise the specter of charges, the U.S. attorney and FBI get involved. No voter fraud is ever actually found. But by the time that conclusion is reached, the myth has been solidified both to soothe the loser’s supporters and condemn the winner.”(HuffPo)

Mazzie shows the specious reasoning in the allegation that ACORN committed voter fraud… but why the appearance of impropriety, fueled by the McCain campaign, may make the truth irrelevant:

“The stunning con of this whole thing is the assumption that bad voter registration cards being submitted will lead to vote fraud. If somebody submits a card for Mickey Mouse it isn’t like Mr. Mouse is going to show up to vote. There is no voter fraud if nobody votes.

But the big story here is what the Right is doing. Their attacks on ACORN open up the door for two things.

First, the ACORN myth allows the Republicans to do more purging of the voter rolls–the process of removing people from the voter rolls because of arbitrary anomalies in the voter registration databases…

Second, in the event that campaigning, purging and intimidating voters doesn’t work, the Right is creating a myth like they did in 1960. They are creating the myth of a stolen election…”

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StupidFilter

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Yahoo! Widgets - Waste Basket

“In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point.

It’s time to fight back.

The solution we’re creating is simple: an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian or similar analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines. The primary challenge inherent in our task is that stupidity is not a binary distinction, but rather a matter of degree. To this end, we’re collecting a ranked corpus of stupid text, gleaned from user comments on public websites and ranked on a five-point scale.

Eventually, once the research is completed, we plan to release core engine source code for incorporation into content management systems, blogs, wikis and the like. Additionally, we plan to develop a fully implemented Firefox plugin and a WordPress plugin.”