Posts Tagged ‘democrats’

Buzz share correlates with polls

Posted: 7 November 2007 in Uncategorized
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I’ve been following the progress of Wonkosphere and talking about it for a while now [here, here, and here].  If you’re not familiar with Wonkosphere, it’s a website that tracks the buzz generated by candidates on political blogs.  It reports buzz as a percentage of the total buzz by conservative, liberal, and independent bloggers.  It also reports the tone of the posts, so you get more than just who is being talked about.  So it appears that the buzz share is a predicter of national polling results According to Kevin Dooley of Wonkosphere, it’s not the total percentage of buzz share that is predictive of polling results, but the change in buzz share that predicts where national numbers are going.  So are blogs affecting politics (as many have suggested) or are they just reflecting social trends?

Kucinich is doing fairly well today with buzz share, coming in at #3 among Democrats.  He spiked a few days ago when his UFO comments incited a conservative love fest of crazy-elf-hippy remarks.  Democracy for America held the 2008 Pulse Poll to gather data about people’s choice for who should be the 2008 Democratic contender.  The results put Kucinich at a fairly decisive #1, beating out the phantom Al Gore (aka Newest Nobel Turd) and John Edwards.  DFA consists primarily of Progressive Democrats, though, so you can’t generalize it to the population at large.  However, these people tend to be rather vocal and active politically, so they may start to rub off.  It’s a daunting task, though, counteracting the media brick-brain effect (i.e. making your brain into a gray brick).

Warmonger beats Comedian

Posted: 6 November 2007 in Uncategorized
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Well, one more reason to dislike Obama, or at least his supporters, as well as this whole political system.  Stephen Colbert was blocked from being put on the Democratic ticket in South Carolina last week.  Turns out, the culprits were a group of Obama supporters.  Inez Tenenbaum, the once superintendent of education in South Carolina (and failed Senatorial hopeful), is a vocal supporter of Obama.  She pressured the gang of 16 members of the Democratic executive council to exclude him from the ticket.  They acquiesced and voted 13-3 to block him.

What is wrong with this picture?  For starters, 16 people decide the who gets to run and who doesn’t for president.  This is one of the hidden daggers in the representative government model.  The American Empire is about voting for one of several candidates the media has hand-picked and groomed to be president.  Of course, this isn’t the media’s fault, they are only watching the money handed down to them and doing what good goons do.   We don’t elect people who operate based on the consensus of the people who put them there.  We elect people who then may do whatever they damn well please while making pretty noises.  Not always even pretty noises (cf. W).  So who votes for this elite cadre of people who make and break presidents before they are even on the ticket?  I guarantee that more than 99% of the electorate doesn’t participate in this process.

Here is a rich line from Tenenbaum after she lobbied the executive council to get Colbert thrown off the ticket:

“I think lobbying was too strong a word.  I called them to see what they were thinking, and if they had made up their mind. I am a volunteer in that campaign, and so I am not a staffer. And I thought it could have taken votes away from a lot of people.”

Logical problems aside, this is also a half-truth (what your mom referred to as a lie).  The fact is, Obama supporters consist of a lot of young, college-educated voters.  Young, college-educated voters watch Colbert.  So by “a lot of people,” she meant to say “my master.”

I’m just so fed up with the Sheepocratic party for their high-talking hypocrisy.  The so-called mandate that they completely rolled over on, showing that they are yellow-bellied toadies is just the start.  There is dirty dealing everywhere I look.

Morning Madness

Posted: 2 November 2007 in Uncategorized
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Ever get pissed twice before you’ve really even opened your eyes? This is why I shouldn’t read my RSS feeds so early in the morning. At the top of the list is Bush equating Democrats who oppose the war (as if it could be called opposition, anyway) to those who ignored Hitler and Lenin and then Hillary firing back. Am I mad at Bush for making this analogy? No and I think he’s correct, but not in the way he thinks. I’m more angry at Hillary for firing back and not recognizing her own culpability. The Sheepocrats sat back and did nothing four years ago when this war began and passed the Patriot Act before that. They have endorsed the war at every stage since and even their current so-called opposition is luke-warm and putrid with its weasliness. So yeah, they are like people who ignored the rise of Hitler and Lenin. If she had recognized that and said it publicly, it would have done her credit.

 

Next up, I was reading a few bit twiddling hacks and came across a nice one for branchless absolute value [hat tip]. The hacks are all in the public domain, too, so that’s good. He does list the occasional variation that is patented, an enormously helpful fact if you’re producing commercial software. So here is the patented version of the branchless absolute value:


int v; // we want to find the absolute value of v
int r; // the result goes here
int const mask = v >> sizeof(int) * CHAR_BIT - 1;
r = (v ^ mask) - mask;

The last ^ (XOR) – (subtract) combination represents the patent. What works also?

r = (v + mask) ^ mask;

As Sean points out, though, the patent probably could be contested if the holder (none other than Sun Microsystems) ever tried to enforce it. So what ticked me off is that such a thing could be patented. I raise my hands in impotent fury at the ludicrousness of software patents. I don’t blame the inventors for them, it’s something you pretty much have to do these days. I blame the system that makes that true.

Update

Did some benchmarks on the two versions of absolute value given above.  Using a 3.06GHz processor, I could run 4 billion absolute values in 18.916 +/- 0.021 seconds for the patented version and 18.906 +/- 0.026 seconds for the free version.  So no need to even bother with the patented version it looks like.

A Colbert Presidency

Posted: 26 October 2007 in Uncategorized
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Probably would not be noticeably bad. Colbert certainly is attracting a massive amount of attention after declaring his desire to run as a candidate in South Carolina. Whereas Barrack Obama’s facebook group was haled as a success after gathering 384k+ members, Colbert’s group skyrocketed to over a million in just one week. So does he actually have a shot at the presidency if he decided to kick it up a notch and run in all 50? That certainly seems to be the case with younger voters at this point, but would it hold out at the actual election? On Wonkosphere, he’s got a buzz percentage of about 4%, roughly one-third of the buzz for the candidates the media is telling you to vote for (Hillary and Giuliani).

Better yet, he should run in 48 states, singling out 2 as “handicap” states to give the other candidates a fighting chance. I’m sure he could find a pair funnier than Alaska and Rhode Island, but that’s a start.

Also, for a good read about why the democratic leadership isn’t worth two farts in the wind, you should check out today’s article on Dissident Voice.

Give Kucinich a Hand

Posted: 24 October 2007 in Uncategorized
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I received this email today from Dennis Kucinich’s election campaign (below the jump). It’s a quick poll where you choose your top 3 candidates (democratic) for president if you had to vote today. So I voted Kucinich, Gravel, and Edwards. The (optional) reason I gave was that Dennis is the only principled candidate and is neither a warhawk nor a corporate stooge. The only thing wrong with him is that he’s not good for advertising revenue and so mainstream media outlets ignore him completely. Considering the massive load of dung that constitutes 99.9% of NBC, ABC, and CBS, 100% of CNN and 110% of Fox’s news coverage, this probably isn’t such a bad thing. It should give people pause, at least, if the media allowed them to think for themselves for 8 seconds.

And we all know that ain’t gunna happen.

Anyhow, please Kucinich a hand and vote for him in that poll.

(more…)

The Failed Congress

Posted: 9 October 2007 in Uncategorized
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The problem with our two-party system is that it encourages uniformity. I am becoming more and more convinced that the only difference between the parties is their rhetoric. An observation that led me to vote Green in the last presidential election. When the Democrats took control of the House in the last election, there was much rejoicing with people celebrating as if the Endless Summer had come at last. There would be no more pain and war and suffering. Total crap. I was happy, but my expectation was failure and weakness and I have not been disappointed.

So now Congress looks to be extending the Bush administration’s wiretapping privileges. Way to stand up for the so-called mandate you were touting, Dems. You suck. From the NY Times:

As the debate over the eavesdropping powers of the National Security Agency begins anew this week, the emerging measures reflect the reality confronting the Democrats.

Although willing to oppose the White House on the Iraq war, they remain nervous that they will be called soft on terrorism if they insist on strict curbs on gathering intelligence.  (emphasis mine)

A Democratic bill to be proposed on Tuesday in the House would maintain for several years the type of broad, blanket authority for N.S.A. eavesdropping that the administration secured in August for six months.

In an acknowledgment of concerns over civil liberties, the bill would require a more active role by the special foreign intelligence court that oversees the interception of foreign-based communications by the security agency.

A competing proposal in the Senate, still being drafted, may be even closer in line with the administration plan, with the possibility of including retroactive immunity for telecommunications utilities that participated in the once-secret program to eavesdrop without court warrants.

Reminds me of those Hefty trash bag commercials: “wimpy wimpy wimpy.” I think that makes for a good analogy, because it’s time to take out the trash. With the exception of Dennis Kucinich, I am giving up on the Democratic party. Dennis is the last principled person there. The rest are Republicans in donkey’s clothing. From here on out, I’m voting straight Green (though actually this isn’t much of a change since I never had much faith in the Sheepocrats and voted Green when I could anyway).

Clinton vs. Obama

Posted: 3 October 2007 in Uncategorized
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I keep feeling the need to write about the battle of the media-darling corporate stooge warhawks. Everyday I see something about fundraising by this candidate or that (and by this I mean Clinton and by that I mean Obama). And everyday I am troubled. When I start to write about it, my thoughts on the subject lack cohesiveness.

Clinton had someone fundraising for her who turned about to be a fugitive of justice, wanted for grand theft. Norman Hsu used a fundraising tactic called bundling, which combines the contributions of many different donors to give it more weight. What does more weight mean?

Today Clinton’s blog is reporting that she raised $27 million for the third quarter, beating Obama in both gross money raised and number of new donors. Yesterday, the NY Times was going on about Obama’s link to a group of black entrepreneurs who supported him back in Illinois. They bailed his campaign out of hot water and he saw that their agenda got pushed in the state legislature. But it looks like their agenda wasn’t all bad (I certainly don’t know enough details to make that assessment), since he was working to remove some racial inequities they were facing. Or is that he was opening up opportunities? Again I was troubled, by his seeming willingness to take a buck and then turn those dollars into actual legislation.

John Edwards’ campaign sent an email a while back pointing the finger at Hillary over her fundraising practices. She hosted a dinner in DC where several congress people were in attendance. Cost of admission to this event was $2000 per plate, as is typical of these woo-the-rich-people functions (a mainstay of Republicans). So it seems she was trading quasi-political influence (here, look at all these Congressmen and women I can connect you too if you support me) for support. Washington business as usual.

Meanwhile principled men like Dennis Kucinich are struggling to raise dollars, because despite seeming to match the actual beliefs of voters much more closely, they haven’t been tapped by the big corporations and their media mouthpieces as electable. Doesn’t it bother people that the candidates the media has branded as electable are the only ones getting attention?