Politico.com: Bush backer pens pro-Obama book (6/16/08)

The conservative Evangelical biographer of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay has moved on to a new subject: Barack Obama. And his new book, due out this summer, may lend credibility to Senator Obama's bid to win Evangelical Christian voters away from the Republican Party.

The forthcoming volume from Stephen Mansfield, whose sympathetic "The Faith of George W. Bush" spent 15 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 2004, is titled "The Faith of Barack Obama." Its tone ranges from gently critical to gushing, and the author defends Obama-and even his controversial former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright-from conservative critics, and portrays him as a compelling figure for Christian voters.

"Young Evangelicals are saying, 'Look, I'm pro-life but I'm looking at a guy who's first of all black-and they love that; two, who's a Christian; and three who believes faith should bear on public policy," Mansfield, who described himself as a conservative Republican, said in a telephone interview. "They disagree with him on abortion, but they agree with him on poverty, on the war."

Crossposted from European Tribune.

It's funny how things happen sometimes. After the New Hampshire primary last Tuesday there were some suggestions that the Democratic primary might have been tampered with. I have taken part in some discussions of this on and off the blog, and my basic take was that

1. the implications are important enough for the allegations to be taken seriously;
   
   
2. "taking the allegations seriously" means carrying out some further tests before jumping to conclusions, especially if you're going to call for an official recall like Dennis Kucinich has done!
   My initial suggestion was to compare the actual vote counts by hand vs. by machine against the exit polls, if an exit poll could be found that aggregated the data according to the vote counting method used in the precinct where the voter was interviewed. Of course this variable was not in the published exit polls. In my enthusiasm I imagined someone in the blogosphere knowing someone in one of the companies that do exit polls, so they could try to get the raw data from election night re-analysed. But see below.
   
   
3. if a statistically significant discrepancy between the vote percentages and the exit polls, aggregated separated by vote counting method, were found, one would have to remember that correlation doesn't imply causation. One could imagine socioeconomic variables correlating independently with both the Clinton/Obama swing and the use of voting machines in a precinct. For instance, rural vs. urban precincts, the size of the town, the average income of the town, whether the local government is democrat or republican controlled, etc. All of these plausible explanations would have to be controlled for before one could claim to have evidence of election fraud.
   

Given the impossibility of getting my hands on disaggregated exit poll data and the observation that the exit polls matched the election results (but see below), I decided not to give the issue any more thought. That is, I ceased to take it seriously.

However, supporters of both Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich among other people didn't lay this to rest and started posting fragmentary statistical analyses of actual voting data. These got more and more elaborate until, earlier today, Drew, who had nagging suspicions and so had been tracking what the blogosphere was saying about this issue, pointed me to a couple of websites that changed my mind, because they contain serious statistical analysis of the kind I suggest in 3) above, albeit performed only on the election data, not on exit polls. But that is actually better as I'll also discuss below.

Now I think there is a high likelihood that the vote counts for Obama and Clinton were exchanged by Diebold voting machines.

This was originally written on March 17, 2004, six days after the Madrid train bombings and three days after Zapatero's election victory. I was a graduate student in Mathematics in California at the time, and I posted this on my personal webpage on the department's website. Months later I was contacted by an old friend from Norway I hadn't heard from for a couple of years, who said he'd seen the article referenced on some internet forum by someone who needed to shut up an apologist for the neo-cons. I submitted it as an op-ed to the LA Times and at least one more major publication, though it was rejected. I thought I had lost it, but I found several copies in my old math department e-mail folders. Here it is, exactly as it was written in an inspired bout of anger and with all the facts fresh in my mind.


Let this serve as a third anniversary commemoration of the victims, and a reminder of why many in Spain will feel let down by Zapatero if, through rookie mistakes, his government falls before the Aznarites lose their grip on Spain's right-wing.

This just in:

Topeka, Kansas (Reuters) - In a stunning reversal, NASA scientists announced today that the Earth is, after all, flat and, in fact, infinite in extent. A visibly embarrassed Nasa Earth Observatory spokesperson explained to a befuddled audience that the discovery came from a reevaluation of the work of 19th Century Italian mathematician Eugenio Beltrami in the light of Einstein's General Relativity and GPS data.

Cross-posted at Daily Kos from European Tribune

I got this e-mail last friday from Ray McGovern, and obtained his permission to redistribute it on Booman's Tribune, so here it is for your enjoyment. Hopefully it will have a higher impact here than on ET or DKos.

November 24, 2005

Will the US Seize the Opening for Troop Withdrawal?

By Ray McGovern

The surprising degree of consensus reached by the main Iraqi factions at the Arab-League orchestrated Reconciliation Conference in Cairo last weekend sharply undercuts the unilateral, guns-and-puppets approach of the Bush administration to the deteriorating situation in Iraq.  The common demand, by Shia and Kurds as well as Sunnis, for a timetable for withdrawal of occupation forces demolishes the administration's argument that setting such a timetable would be a huge mistake.  Who would know better--the Iraqis or the ideologues advising Bush?

Read the rest after the fold.

Ray McGovern is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).  He worked as a CIA analyst for 27 years, and now works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC.

An earlier version of this article appeared on TomPaine.com