Can you believe this? That you actually have to call the NRA to ask them to endorse the pro-2nd Amendment Sharron Angle over Harry Reid?

Well, you just might.

Harry Reid may have bought them off by giving them a carve-out (exception) in the DISCLOSE Act, and now it's their turn to pony up their end of the deal.

Or maybe it's for an earmark.

Either way, it's corrupt and contrary to the stated goals of the organization.

But it's an odious deal, and if you're a member, you should express your strong disagreement.

Why would they do this? Why would they go out of their way to protect a Senator who has demonstrated a repeated hostility to the Second Amendment in his votes and his leadership?

Well, I thought perhaps the NRA carveout in the DISCLOSE Act might be the answer. But, there is more. It turns out, Reid secured a $61 million earmark for a gun range in Clark County, Nevada.

NRA members were recently treated to a three-page spread in the American Rifleman about a visit to Nevada by Wayne LaPierre and Chris Cox to “thank” Reid for the earmark. The article even includes a cliché picture of Reid cutting a ribbon with a gigantic pair of scissors. (Every good porker has his own giant pair of gold earmark scissors.)...

At 3:25, you can hear LaPierre touting Reid’s record on guns saying, “I also want to thank you, Senator, for your support every day for the Second Amendment and for the rights of American gun owners. “

The American Rifleman article also commends Reid’s Second Amendment record noting, “His dedication to this project is just one of the ways Sen. Reid has demonstrated his support for gun owners and the Second Amendment.”

Well, thatÂ’s all very nice. What politician representing a pro-gun red state wouldnÂ’t want Wayne LaPierre to come out for a personal photo op at their earmark ribbon cutting.

But, here is the problem. Reid has not supported the Second Amendment “every day.” Or ever.

Reid has a lifetime rating of “F” from Gun Owners of America (who Ron Paul once called “the only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington”). GOA is actively supporting the 100% pro-gun Republican nominee, Sharron Angle, in her campaign to unseat Harry Reid.

So he bought off the NRA with a taxpayer-funded earmark?

If this is true -- if this happens -- the NRA should be made to pay. Same as the GOP should be made to pay for corrupt deals against the interests of its members.

Denied: NRA reps are saying this isn't true.

Posted by: Ace at 10:12 AM | Comments (170)
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Well, like Lucas, they've decide the original could use some new scenes and fresh special effects.

I really have to recommend you watch this video, nevermind the "you cannot unsee what you have seen" stuff. It takes the whole saga through the separation and Laurie David allegations.

The hippie chick telling the accuser that she mustn't rat on Gore, or the planet will die, is worth it right there.

The only thing missing is a visual reference to the second chakra. more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:15 AM | Comments (145)
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Details:

1) The suit alleges that Research 2000 founder Del Ali repeatedly promised to volunteer to Kos the raw polling data behind the surveys, but never came through -- potentially raising further suspicions. The suit quotes multiple emails from Ali to Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, vowing to share the data.

The suit quotes an email from Ali that seemed to ask for more time to furnish the data because of office computer malfunctions, prompting him to go to a Kinkos. "I am at a Kinkos computer because we cannot read any mail from our PCs," Ali emailed to Moulitsas, according to the suit.

2) The suit alleges that Research 2000 had money problems, which could prompt further questions about the firm's business practices. It alleges that Ali asked Moulitsas to make one lump-sum payment in advance, in exchange for some free polling, because it would provide "immense" help for cash flow reasons.
3) The suit alleges that Ali was infuriated when statistics guru Nate Silver recently rated the firm poorly. It says that when Kos reacted to the Silver analysis by terminating their relationship, Ali responded to Kos with a lengthy defense of his polling methods, lashing out at Silver as "nothing more than a fringe blogger."

I don't get that last allegation, really, as it serves to help R2K more than Kos -- because it supplies a motive for Kos to talk smack about the company and weasel out of paying them (if he owed them money, which R2K implies he did but Kos says he didn't).

Nate Silver says that releasing the raw data is R2K's best move... if innocent. And if they don't release the data, it looks pretty shaky for them.

Particularly if the data release occurred as soon as possible, and was as comprehensive as possible, Mr. Ali would be entitled to a strong intellectual (rather than merely legal) presumption of innocence. In addition, the spreadsheet could presumably contain the weights Ali assigned to individual observations, which would help to explain why Research 2000 has produced results that are unusual, even if they are not fraudulent.

But so far, Research 2000 has not made such documentation available, certainly not to the public, nor apparently to its client, Daily Kos, in spite of having had two weeks of warning that Daily Kos was about to publish a study that called the propriety of their polling into question. Perhaps he will take the opportunity to do so now.

Horeover, although it would not be easy to fabricate or reverse-engineer such data, a sufficiently cunning and unscrupulous person could presumably do so, given enough time....

Another form of proof that Ali could offer would be records, such as invoices, from the call center(s) that he used to conduct his polling. Research 2000, which lists only a post office box as its contact information, almost certainly does not have its own call center (nor do most pollsters, for that matter).... The volume of business between Research 2000 and its call center would presumably be extremely high. If the call center could conduct interviews for Research 2000 at a rate of $5 per completed survey -- and that's probably a very aggressive rate for traditional, non-automated telephone polling -- it would be doing about $12,000 worth of business with Research 2000 per week, assuming a 1,200-person national survey and two 600-person state surveys, as is fairly typical for them. That would amount to more than $600,000 worth of business per year, which surely would have produced a long paper trail.

Huh. I assumed R2K did automated (robo) calling, so the costs of surveys would be, if not trivial, pretty darn low, so I thought they'd have no particular motivation to falsify any damn thing. If they were supposed to be conducting person-to-person surveys, that's more expensive then, and then they would have an incentive.

If it was a third-party call-center placing the calls, though: There's the possibility the data was faked but not by R2K, but by whichever company was supposedly doing the calling. It's cheaper to just fake up a bunch of "interviews" than pay 100 people $10 an hour for five nights to actually do them.

More Caution: A pollster tells me the data can get funky when it's weighted -- a lot of this is wack-a-mole stuff where if you, say, weight up a particular subgroup because you didn't get enough respondents there (say young adults), it then starts throwing your other subgroups out of whack, and you then have to weight those down, etc.

A lot of data supplied in polls has been painfully tweaked. Each tweaking introduces new artifacts of manipulation.

The sort of analysis conducted here, showing R2K to have engaged in fraud, is only possible because R2K released detailed crosstabs which most other firms withhold from the public.

Point being: It's quite possible the analysis that showed falsification would have shown falsification in any number of perfectly-legitimate polls, due to all the manipulation/weighting of numbers, but such analyses are never performed because no one else routinely releases detailed crosstabs to the public. So some of the stuff found to be suspicious may only look suspicious because usually the sausage-making ugliness is better hidden from outside eyes.

Anyway, that's one possible theory. I don't know enough to stand by that or do much more than float it.

Posted by: Ace at 09:01 AM | Comments (39)
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Interestingly-- perhaps coincidentally, but interestingly -- unemployment figures stopped falling after ObamaCare went into effect. (That is, new unemployment claims stopped falling and leveled off at a high-ish level.)

Unemployment claims actually went up again, and Reuters is right there to say "unexpectedly."

Posted by: Ace at 08:48 AM | Comments (53)
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Personally, I'd rather he avoid being President by going golfing. Again.

As per the norm, he won't be doing anything about illegal immigration or border enforcement, just talking about.

"The president's view is that there's been a lot in the news about immigration lately," deputy press secretary Bill Burton said Wednesday. "There's been the Arizona law, there's been meetings about it, there's been protests about it. He thought this was a good time to talk plainly with the American people about his views on immigration."

The president has been looking for ways to appear more proactive, rather than reactive, on immigration -- a hot-button political issue that is important to Hispanics in the Democratic base, who could play an important part in the outcome of the midterm elections.

This speech isn't about policy, it's about rallying the Hispanic vote ahead of the mid-terms. Obama promised to do something about this early in his term and so far...nothing. So it's time to shift blame, appear above the fray and beat up on Republicans.

Yesterday on Twitter, Andy Levy had the best preview (and likely summation) of the speech you will find....

In advance of POTUS's immigration speech tmrw, I'd like 2 express my condolences 2 the families of all the dead & wounded straw men.

Something I'm fairly sure won't be mentioned...how awesome it will be to add tens of millions newly legalized workers to an economy still hemorrhaging jobs.

Added: Shockingly Obama is making no distinctions between immigration and illegal immigration.

Obama just said something to the effect of 'illegal immigration makes a mockery of those going through the legal process'. Um, so the answer is to jump the illegals ahead of those playing by the rules? I guess my pants aren't sufficiently creased to understand that thinking.

Remember when Obama was considered a great orator? Why was that again?

My God, this is a speech filled with warmed over ideas, straw-men and catchphrases. At least it's being delivered in a low energy, stumbling manner.

If Obama really wanted to get something going on this issue, he'd be giving this speech in a bigger, higher energy setting doing his "Fired up, ready to go! Yes we can!" shtick. This pseudo-serious stuff will get him a little credit from the left but not put himself so far out there that he's committed to doing something.

Shorter Obama..."Hey that 2007 immigration effort worked out well, let's just try the same thing again. Now watch this drive!"

Via, um, me on Twitter: Something to consider when you read the inevitable praise for this speech...what in it couldn't and wasn't said in '07 (by Bush!)?

Post-partisan President says: Most Democrats are ready to deal with this but evil Republicans aren't. Well, sort of. There would be plenty of bi-partisan support for an enforcement only approach. Yet that's not on the table. So spare me this, "Republicans are mean" crap.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:09 AM | Comments (231)
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This programming was made possible by...viewers like you and riffling the pockets of dead hobos (but mostly the dead hobos).

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:28 AM | Comments (174)
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Private enterprise continues to flourish even in hard times.

Sheboygan has a new economic dynamo! "Green shoots" indeed!

The Dickinson, ND Roughrider Days Fair & Expo will be conducting a livestock sale. Remember: no beef is ever as tasty as the beef you slaughter yourself! (You can buy your bone saw and drag hook here if you're not already set up.)

Alas, this was the pretty much the extent of the good economic news.

Equities stood indecisively on the ledge for much of the day, but took a dive in the last hour and hit the pavement with a wet smack. The S&P 500 closed at 1,030.71 and the Dow closed at 9,774.02. The Dow was down 10% for the quarter.

Fun facts: the S&P 500 on June 30, 2000 stood at 1,454.60; the Dow on June 30, 2000 stood at 10,447.89. That flushing sound you just heard is a whole decade going straight down the toilet.

more...

Posted by: Monty at 02:33 AM | Comments (162)
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