News Cut: October 23, 2008 Archive

Election Day hash

Posted at 8:45 AM on October 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (7 Comments)
Filed under: Politics

Last week, Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie held a news conference to reassure voters that the state is free from the intentional or unintentional shenanigans in some other states that have roiled the confidence in the voting process.

Today, the New York Times' lead editorial said voting rolls maintained by local officials "are one of the weakest links in American democracy and problems are growing."

CNN today is carrying a report of a problem in West Virginia, where a touch-screen vote for Barack Obama is really a vote for John McCain.

This is one of the reasons I called Dan Wallach at Rice University this week (hear a portion of the interview on MPR's Future Tense). Recently he gave his students some voting machines that he built based on the source code he's seen from the commercial voting machines. He encouraged them to try to hack into them to make the results favorable to their candidate. They did it, and apparently, easily so.

Wallach says it's possible to build a safe voting machine that works because he's built one and he's offered it -- free -- to the voting machine companies. They've never called.

At last summer's Democratic National Convention in Denver, I attended a lengthy seminar on voting problems. It featured the secretary of state of voting-challenged Ohio as well as representatives of the voting machine industry. By the end of the day, it was clear we have a nutty system -- or, rather, 50 of them.

Take North Carolina, Wallach says. There, voters have a choice to vote the "all Democratic ticket" or the "all Republican ticket." But what many voters don't know is the "all" option in North Carolina doesn't include a vote for president. So people may not know that they really didn't vote in the contest.

Wallach is sure there's going to be a major polling place problem in the United States on Election Day. He doesn't know where, although he says if it's North Carolina, he won't be surprised.

"Why not have one method of voting for the entire country?" I asked.

"I think that's an excellent idea," he said. (Listen)

What arguments against it outweigh an accurate vote?

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Greenspan: It'll get worse

Posted at 9:16 AM on October 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Economy

"I cannot see how we can avoid a significant rise in layoffs and unemployment," former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan told a congressional panel this morning. Greenspan was the poster boy for the boom times of the market, at least until he gave his "irrational exuberance" testimony earlier in the decade.

"What went wrong with global policies?" he asked this morning, and then answered. "Subprime mortgages served as securities became subject to explosive demand around the world." He said as long as home prices were rising, the risk from foreclosure was "deceptively modest."

A lot of people blame Greenspan for not speaking out about mortgage-backed securities when he had the job, although he insisted this morning, he did. "We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century credit tsunami," he said.

Hopeless? Apparently not. Greenspan said, "this crisis will pass" and we will be stronger for it. Still, that may be cold comfort to the tens of thousands of people who Greenspan expects will lose their jobs first.

Questions and Answers

Q: (Henry Waxman) You were a leading proponent of deregulation. Were you wrong?
A: Partially. He defended "derivatives," which he says transferred risk from those who couldn't afford it to those who could. "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations -- banks -- was such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and the equity in their firms," he said, saying loan officers at banks knew "far more than even our best regulators."

Q: Paul Krugman in 2006 said you shared some of the blame for the sub-prime crisis. Do you share any blame?
A: Greenspan denied that he didn't listen to officials who alerted him to the building mortgage crisis. He blamed a subcommittee of the Fed Board would "move forward and present to the board as a whole, recommendations to be made. That didn't happen."

Q: Did you ideology push you to make decisions you wish you didn't make?
A: "I found a flaw ... in the model that I perceived in the critical functioning of how the world works." (Is that's "fed" talk for 'yes?').

During Greenspan's initial testimony, the Dow jumped about 150 points.

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Scotch Tape science

Posted at 10:23 AM on October 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Science

On one of yesterday's visits with Mary Lucia on the Current, I mentioned the finding that under the right circumstances, you could use a roll of Scotch Tape to make an X-Ray.

Here's the story on Nature News.

As long ago as 1953, a team of scientists based in Russia suggested that peeling sticky tape produced X-rays. But "we were very sceptical about the old results," says Escobar (the researcher). His team decided to look into the phenomenon anyway, and found that X-rays were indeed given off, in high-energy pulses.

When the researchers placed a small plastic window in their vacuum chamber, they were even able to take an X-ray image of a finger, using a dental X-ray detector. Their results are published in Nature.

What can science do with this newfound knowledge? "The researchers suggest that the high charge density generated by peeling the tape could be great enough to trigger nuclear fusion," the article said.

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Arne's endorsement

Posted at 12:16 PM on October 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)
Filed under: Politics

There's plenty of buzz in Minnesota's political circles today about former Republican Gov. Arne Carlson endorsing Barack Obama. But the move isn't terribly surprising.

Carlson is a more traditional East Coast Republican -- a Williams College educated intellectual with an appreciation of both social service and fiscal conservatism -- a progressive Republican. That's the kind of Republican the party purged in the '90s.

Carlson was a thorn in the side of the party, even when he was its highest-ranking official as governor, so the endorsement is unlikely to sway many -- if any -- Republicans. During his term, the party consistently endorsed more conservative candidates for governor. Carlson usually ignored them, then beat them handily in the party primaries. Carlson was the first Republican governor in the state's history to be denied the endorsement by his own party.

Alan Quist lost in a landslide to Carlson in 1994 after running a campaign based on moral issues -- Carlson supported legalized abortion -- but that was back before that became the party mainstay, and when Republicans in the state were known as Independent Republicans.

Since leaving office, Carlson has teamed up with former VP Walter Mondale to try to repeal the concealed carry handgun law in the state, criticized Gov. Tim Pawlenty's budget plan to use money from the Health Care Access fund, which funds the state health insurance program, and went to the Legislature to lobby against Pawlenty's cuts in a state program to curb fetal alcohol syndrome, which was his wife's project. He's also endorsed the occasional Democrat in state Legislature races, as he did in 2004 in DFLer Jim Carlson unsuccessful bid in District 38B, and he endorsed DFLer Rebecca Otto in her successful campaign for state auditor in 2006.

And earlier in this campaign, the Washington Post published a letter from Carlson lamenting that religion was being used in the Republican Party as a litmus test for the vice presidential selection.

For more than a decade, Arne Carlson has had nothing in common with the Republican Party. Today was no exception.

(Listen to Carlson's announcement via Polinaut)

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Minnesota's 'unAmerican' connection

Posted at 1:15 PM on October 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Politics

Everything has a Minnesota connection one way or another.

While Minnesota's political landscape has been consumed by the Michele Bachmann's Hardball comments, in California the scandal has been Obama Bucks. The president of the San Bernadino Republican women's club has apologized and resigned after she put an image of Obama Bucks in a newsletter. Diane Fedele says she was ignorant of the fact fried chicken and watermelon have racial overtones. She said she got the image in a number of chain e-mails.

Where did the image come from? Minnesota, according to the Press Enterprise of San Bernadino

(Tim) Kastelein, who received a low-level organizing position within the Democratic Party in Minnesota earlier this year, said he meant the cartoon as a satirical look at "right-wingers."

He said he created the image to lampoon Republicans who are afraid of government welfare programs and fearful of a Democratic president. He said that "there's some people that are never going to get it."

Kastelein, according to Press-Enterprise politics editor John Bender, has messed up a few reputations, including one man profiled by Minnesota Public Radio's Julie Siple last year in a piece she wrote about recovering your reputation once it's been damaged online.

Terry Steindel (shown above) lives my nightmare: One day he was just doing his job, selling homes, and a blogger made fun of a flyer he'd stuffed in mailboxes around town.

"They just slammed it," he remembers. "And they said: Would you buy a piece of real estate from this agent?"

So there it sat -- a nasty blog entry. When Terry searched his name, it was right at the top of Google returns. Terry didn't grow up Myspacing; he wasn't Internet savvy. He didn't know what to do.

Steindel didn't know until Wednesday, according to the Press Enterprise, that his online attacker was Kastelein.

"What's his agenda? I don't really understand," Steindel said. "That kind of crap we really don't need. ... You know what -- It's un-American."

Kastelein once reviewed a Symantec anti-virus product, calling it "worse than the Holocaust." His Web page content has been taken down. It now redirects the user to a donation page on Barack Obama's Web site.

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Are viral videos for Democrats only?

Posted at 3:39 PM on October 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Politics

On Wednesday on Future Tense, I talked to Brad Reed of NetworkWorld, who discussed how viral video is shaping the campaign of 2008.

The latest political video to go viral is this one, featuring Opie and Andy Taylor, and Richie Cunningham and the Fonze.

(h/t: Vox Politics)

One question I neglected to ask Reed, however: Where are all the Republican viral videos?

Viral Video Chart tracks what videos are spread across the Internet, usually embedded in blogs. Of the 20 most "viral" videos, only three could be considered anti-Obama. Two suggested youngs kids are being indoctrinated by Obama-loving adults.

A third video on the list is an installment in the "October Surprise" videos. Let's say they go further than Michele Bachmann has.

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