Reader Tips

Reader Tips 81 Comments

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Thursday night wild-card show, here is Mr. Bob Newhart performing his classic Stop It! sketch (6:16).

Update: in the comments, PiperPaul mentions that Mr. Newhart’s Stop It! sketch reminds him of Monty Python’s Argument sketch. Indeed, the Argument sketch is a classic. You may also enjoy, from said troupe: the Job Interview sketch, the Communist Quiz sketch, the International Philosophy Match sketch, or even, perhaps, the Mrs. Premise & Mrs. Conclusion sketch, featuring (as his wife Betty-Muriel puts it) Mr. John-Paul “Bourgeoisie This & Bourgeoisie That” Sartre, yet another French philosopher.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Olivia Chow Misleads Constituents About Internal Web Poll Rigging

Roadkill 99 Comments

Get a load of this;

Olivia Chow’s Website Hacked
[…] The website, which had a poll asking users to vote, was blatantly ’spammed’ with hundreds of votes, shows the website logs.
The poll which asked voters if they rejected Harper’s economic plans had a 60/40-yes/no split between about 170 votes. Around 11:30 pm yesterday it began gaining hundreds of votes in a few hours, all in favour of ‘no’.
Until that time, the poll only attracted an average of about 10 votes a day and had around 60 percent in favour of Olivia’s position. According to website logs, at 11:36 pm on December 10th, the poll began getting 200-300 votes an hour all suspiciously cast contrary to Olivia’s position.
Early on, the website’s administrator tried resetting it to pre-11:30 pm results, but it was obvious the poll was being spammed by a disingenuous voter, or spamming software set in motion.

Except that the “resetting” operation by her website admin (in which 81 “no” votes were deleted) was performed without any public indication that changes had been made – and long before I linked to it here at SDA.
From the comments – “suspiciously cast contrary to Olivia’s position”. That pretty much says it all right there, doesn’t it?”

The 2008 Local Government Performance Index

More Money Than Brains 5 Comments

A new publication from the Frontier Center for Public Policy;

* The 2008 Local Government Index is the second edition of this Frontier project. It presents and compares financial statistics for Canada’s 79 most populous municipalities that publish financial statements in English for the 2006 and 2007 financial years. All figures are normalized on a per-household basis so that cities of different sizes can be compared.
* It analyses regional averages for revenue, expenditure, financial position, and standards of accounting disclosure. The regions are defined as British Columbia, the Prairies, Ontario, Montreal (alone), and the Maritimes.
* For each city, a one page report presents the specific statistics for that city as a proportion of the average for its region.
* Of the numerous statistics that emerge, the Index finds that the average Canadian municipality carries $1,538 dollars of debt per household, controls approximately $15,000 worth of capital assets, raises $1,937 in taxes and $4,869 in total revenue and spends $4,557 each year.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Climate Cult 36 Comments

I’ll see your CBC Fruit Fly Guy and raise you….

“I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.” – Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.
“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical.” – Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology and formerly of NASA who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called “among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years.”
Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” – UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.
“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists,” – Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.
“The models and forecasts of the UN IPCC “are incorrect because they only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity.” – Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico
“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” – U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.

“UN Blowback: More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims.”

An Olivia Chow Poll Goes Horribly Wrong

Roadkill 87 Comments

UPDATE: Chow admits to internal administration tampering of her own website poll when votes were “cast contrary to Olivia’s position”. Only in the world of the the NDP!
Oh, dear… This is embarrassing.
10:25 pm

chowpoll1_cropped.jpg
View screenshot

10:45 pm

chowpoll2_cropped.jpg
View screenshot

h/t and screenshot credit to “Anna” !
Flashback to Lorne Calvert’s “Raise A Flag” poll-rigging fiasco. What is it about New Democrat politicians that renders them incapable of accepting rejection from the voters?
You’d think they’d be used to it by now.
Morning update –
Yes! (20%, 112 Votes)
No! (80%, 462 Votes)
Total Voters: 574
8:05 EST, December 11, 2008
And then….
chow_nopoll.jpg
Olivia, thy last name is Chavez!
Update – Now the admitted poll “resetter” is claiming her website was hacked.

What Would We Do Without “Insiders”?

Political Animal 129 Comments

In related developments, sources at CTV reveal the Senate is “unelected”;

Prime Minister Stephen Harper plans to fill 18 vacancies in the unelected Senate with Conservative loyalists before Christmas, CTV News has learned.
Sources said Harper is concerned the Senate committee system isn’t working properly because there are only 20 Conservative senators sitting in the Liberal-dominated Red Chamber.
But according to insiders, what really drove Harper to move quickly and fill the vacant Senate seats is the possibility of losing political power in January at the hands of the Liberal-NDP coalition

I know. It came as a shock to me, too.

Reader Tips

Reader Tips 32 Comments

Good evening, EBD here. Welcome to SDA Late Night Radio, Wednesday edition. Tonight for your entertainment The Pogues join together with The Dubliners on Irish tv to sing Irish Rover.
Amusing note: near the end of the song, at approx. 3:46, the Pogue’s singer Shane McGowan (he’s the guy between the ears) and the combined members of the two bands spring a surprise ending on the Dubliner’s singer Ronnie Drew. Cracks me up every time.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

The Keynesian Nightmare

What He Said 54 Comments

There are few statements that irritate me more than this seven link coil of bullcrap masquerading as wisdom:
“The best social program is a job”.
No, it’s not.
A “job” is something that creates wealth for someone else in excess of whatever paltry or princely sum they pay you.
A “social program” is something that redistrubutes wealth created by those who have a “job” into the pockets of those who don’t.
Nobody goes into business to create jobs, no matter what they might say when angling for tax incentives. They go into business to create wealth for themselves, which sometimes necessitates paying others to help them create it.
But wait, Kate! What about all those jobs building infrastructure?

The Chicago Candidate

The One 48 Comments

ABC News;

Chicago Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL) is the anonymous “Senate Candidate #5” whose emissaries Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich reportedly claimed offered up to a million dollars to name him to the U.S. Senate, federal law enforcement sources tell ABC News.

The timeline – “Pretty much everything fits except Barack Obama’s statement yesterday that he knew nothing about it. “
Update: I had no contact with the governor or his office… Whoops!
obama%20blagojevich.JPG
Now that Drudge has linked to the story, the original page has been wiped clean. Oddly enough! (Update – it’s been grabbed here.
But they missed this one…
Update – and it goes poof, too! … even the Google cached versions are disappearing.

“And I thought I was fairly sophisticated in such matters.”

More Money Than Brains 13 Comments

Moneyrunner;

Most of the discussion regarding the plan to sell the Illinois Senate seat to the highest bidder has focused on the process. What is equally interesting are the many possibilities for getting rich that are open to a well-connected politician – especially one that has the ear of a President.
In the case of Blagojevich these include an interest in getting an appointment to the Red Cross, becoming the head of a private foundation dependent on federal funding. Becoming the leader of a union organization. There was also talk of getting himself or his wife appointed to a number of corporate boards, which usually are well paid for very little work. Also of great interest was setting up a 501 (c) (4) organization with the aid of wealthy supporters of Obama like Warren Buffet as a way of creating a pool of money that Blagojevich would run for his personal benefit while advancing his political aspirations.
What the Blagojevich complaint illustrates graphically is the potential for graft on a widespread scale in government. The scale of that graft expands exponentially as government grows and dispenses hundreds of billions, even trillions, of dollars. There is a lesson here that should inform the public about the ways that corruption goes hand-in-hand with public pools of money.
Also, note the focus on ways of making money illegally via so-called non-profit organizations. The Blagojevich complaint opened my eyes.

What’s Eating Greece?

Radioactive 13 Comments

The eurozone’s weakest link;

I am a little surpised that the riot phase of this long politico-economic drama known as EMU has kicked off so soon, and that it has done so first in Greece where the post-bubble hangover has barely begun.
The crisis is much further advanced in Spain, which is a year or two ahead of Greece in the crisis cycle.
My old job as Europe correspondent based in Brussels led me to spend a lot of time in cities that struck me as powder kegs – and indeed became powder kegs in the case of Rotterdam following the murder of Pim Fortyn, and Antwerp following the Muslim street riots (both of which I covered as a journalist). Lille, Strasbourg, Marseilles, Amsterdam, Brussels, all seemed inherently unstable, and I do not get the impression that the big cities of Spain and Italy are taking kindly to new immigrants.
The picture is going to get very ugly as Europe slides deeper into recession next year. The IMF expects Spain’s unemployment to reach 15pc. Immigrants are already being paid to leave the country. There will be riots in Spain too (there have been street skirmishes in Barcelona).
Hedge funds, bond vigilantes, and FX traders will be watching closely. In the end, a currency union is no stronger than the political will of the constituent states.

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