Cknolls

Barney Frank says the White House will sign a $25 billion dollar auto aid package. (Bloomberg)

I'm guessing that Paulson knows that the Treasury has $2 triilion dollars of sh** as collateral and doesn't want to purchase anymore outright. I say let the pigs fail and get to the finish line that much faster. All these programs are doing is pushing the timeline out into the near future.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Nov 12, 2008 -> 11:57 AM) What's left? A reacharound? That's the least they can do for him.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Nov 12, 2008 -> 11:54 AM) Aren't those really low interest rates part of the problem? It drove investors to look for "safe" options with better than 1% return, so they turned to mortgage-backed securities. Absolutely, Easy, cheap money is what caused the bubble. And I'm afraid we have another 18-24 months of pain.

The mkts are bigger than any gov't or stimuli that a gov't throws its way. Obama has a terrible job ahead of him and I personally do not think anything the gov't does will be effective. But I have been quite the bear over the last 18 months. Once we test the 2002 lows at 768 and they do not hold, we ultimately head to 660ish on the S&P. I would look to that level for a bottom on the S&P, and somewhere around 6500 on the Dow. Another thing, this bailout of the auto industry should have HUGE strings attached, i.e., UNION work rules. Putting 25- 75 billion into these companies without either a reduction in blue collar jobs and benefits, or benefits for retirees is like lighting 25-75 billion in a bonfire.

QUOTE (MAX @ Nov 12, 2008 -> 01:13 AM) Considering Obama has been in office for nearly four years as a senator, though not doing his job hardly at all for two of them so he could campaign, he can lay the blame squarely on himself and his legislative peers in addition for the soon to be former president. People seem to think that the president is the reason for everything wrong in this country. I highly doubt the change people speak of will end up being anything more than an election slogan.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Nov 11, 2008 -> 06:30 PM) That would qualify both Bush and Clinton then, but Clinton's was pretty mild and I don't even know how he could've stopped it really. I was too young to know about Reagan and Bush 41 and what caused it. And Bush didn't really have the authority to stop the housing bubble either. It was mild because Greenspan crushed interest rates. Also, can someone tell me how Bush de-regulated the mkts?

Rumor has it Obama called Lugar from the plane yesterday after his trip to the White House.

QUOTE (Cknolls @ Nov 11, 2008 -> 10:04 AM) As of this morning, Norm Coleman leads Al Franken by 206 votes in the results reported for the Minnesota Senate seat at issue this year. The mandatory recount is to begin next week. Hennepin County includes the city of Minneapolis and its suburbs. It is Minnesota's most populous county. One of our readers served as an election judge on November 4 for a precinct in Hennepin County and writes to reiterate a point we have previously noted: As "machine judge" it was my duty to set up and take down the voting machine. I still find it very surprising that there has been no attention to the issue pertaining to problems with transmitting the election results in Hennepin county. I followed up with other city authorities and confirmed what I had heard. The way the process is to work is that the voting machine or optical scanner is set up in the morning and a tape is run that is left in the machine showing a zero sum total for all the candidates. The polls are then opened and the ballots are fed in throughout the day. There is a counter on the machine which shows how many ballots have been counted, so that a comparison to the number of ballots used can be made. At the end of the day, the polling location is closed, and the absentee ballots are then addressed and fed into the machine. Once all this is done, we must close out the totals. This entails a number of steps, one of which is transmitting the results. There is a modem in each of the voting machines which can dial up the county and send the results before the official tape is printed within the machine. This offers a level of security as the results are now off site, and the Official Tape with the totals is still at the precinct. What happened on election night was Hennepin County set up the wrong IP address for all the machines in the county. There was no way to transmit the results to a secure off site location. Instead all the precinct's needed to pull the electronic cards out of the machine, along with the tape, and head to City Hall to consolidate and then have them sent to the County. This means that one person had all the voting results and ballots in their possession for that precinct. So it certainly dropped the level of security a level. So in my mind the process was not followed, and the integrity of the procedure was flawed, if not corrupted. I personally recorded the totals from my precinct to view and ensure they were recorded properly, however some judges after working 16 hours, may not have felt the need to be as diligent, nor hang around to the very end. A cynic could say something could have been swapped out in the process. Someone should be asking Hennepin County officials and [Minnesota Secretary of State] Mark Ritchie, why the transmission of votes from these machines did not work. and how can they ensure the integrity of all the vote totals without this added step. I really believe this needs to be addressed. This system did not work as it was designed and someone needs to explain why. I can't find any report of the events raised by our reader in the local press. If accurate, it is an important element in the story now being played out. Source:http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2008/11/022049.php --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

QUOTE (Cknolls @ Nov 11, 2008 -> 10:03 AM) The single most illuminating account of the shifting Coleman-Franken election results that I have found since the numbers started moving after 100 percent of precincts had reported Wednesday morning is this column by John Lott: When voters woke up on Wednesday morning after the election, Senator Norm Coleman led Al Franken by what seemed like a relatively comfortable 725 votes. By Wednesday night, that lead had shrunk to 477. By Thursday night, it was down to 336. By Friday, it was 239. Late Sunday night, the difference had gone down to just 221 -- a total change over 4 days of 504 votes. Amazingly, this all has occurred even though there hasn't even yet been a recount. Just local election officials correcting claimed typos in how the numbers were reported. Counties will certify their results today, and their final results will be sent to the secretary of state by Friday. The actual recount won't even start until November 19. Correcting these typos was claimed to add 435 votes to Franken and take 69 votes from Coleman. Corrections were posted in other races, but they were only a fraction of those for the Senate. The Senate gains for Franken were 2.5 times the gain for Obama in the presidential race count, 2.9 times the total gain that Democrats got across all Minnesota congressional races, and 5 times the net loss that Democrats suffered for all state House races. Virtually all of Franken's new votes came from just three out of 4130 precincts, and almost half the gain (246 votes) occurred in one precinct -- Two Harbors, a small town north of Duluth along Lake Superior -- a heavily Democratic precinct where Obama received 64 percent of the vote. None of the other races had any changes in their vote totals in that precinct. To put this change in perspective, that single precinct's corrections accounted for a significantly larger net swing in votes between the parties than occurred for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, or state house races. The two other precincts (Mountain Iron in St. Louis county and Partridge Township in Pine county) accounted for another 100 votes each. The change in each precinct was half as large as the pickup for Obama from the corrections for the entire state. The Minneapolis Star Tribune attributed these types of mistakes to "exhausted county officials," and that indeed might be true, but the sizes of the errors in these three precincts are surprisingly large. Indeed, the 504 total new votes for Franken from all the precincts is greater than adding together all the changes for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, and state house races combined (a sum of 482). It was also true that precincts that gave Obama a larger percentage of the vote were statistically more likely to make a correction that helped Franken. The recent Washington State 2006 gubernatorial recount is probably most famous for the discovery of ballots in heavily Democratic areas that had somehow missed being counted the first and even second time around. Minnesota is already copying that, though thus far on a much smaller scale, with 32 absentee ballots being discovered in Democratic Hennepin County after all the votes had already been counted. When those votes are added in, they seemed destined to cut Coleman's lead further. Indeed, it is probably through the discovery of new votes that Franken has his best shot of picking up new votes. Despite the press pushing a possible replay of election judges divining voters' intentions by looking at "hanging chads" to see if voters meant to punch a hole, that shouldn't be an issue in Minnesota. The reason is simple: optical scan vote counting machines return ballots to voters if no vote is recorded for a contested race. The Associated Press piece with the title "Most Minn. Senate 'undervotes' are from Obama turf" misinformed readers about what undervotes really imply. The Minneapolis Star Tribune headline similarly claimed "An analysis of ballots that had a vote for president but no vote for U.S. senator could have recount implications." Voters themselves insert their ballot into the machine that reads and records their votes, and if the machine finds that a vote isn't recorded, voters can either mark the race that they forgot to mark or didn't mark clearly. Or if voters "overvoted" and accidentally marked too many candidates, voters can also get a fresh ballot. There should be no role to divine voters' intentions. If a voter wanted a vote recorded for a particular race, the machine tells him whether his vote in all the races was counted. But voters also have the right not to vote in particular races. In this election, 0.4 percent of Minnesotans didn't want to vote for president. The number for the Senate race was only slightly higher at 0.8 percent. For congressional and state House races, the rates were 3 and 3.5 percent. This pattern of fewer people voting in less important elections has been observed as long as people have studied elections. There are always at least a few people who don't vote for even the most closely contested races at the top of the ballot and fewer people follow and vote for races the farther down the ballot that you go. But this is not evidence of mistakes, quite the contrary. With ACORN filing more than 43,000 registration forms this year, 75 percent of all new registrations in the state, Minnesota was facing vote fraud problems even before the election. Even a small percentage of those registrations resulting in fraudulent votes could tip this election. To many, it just seems like too much of a coincidence that Minnesota's one tight race just happens to be the race with the most "corrected" votes by far. But the real travesty will be to start letting election officials divine voter's intent. If you want to discourage people from voting, election fraud is one sure way of doing it. Since Lott wrote his column, Coleman's margin has shrunk yet again. As of this evening, the Minnesota Secretary of State's site reports that Coleman's margin over Franken has shrunk from 221 to 206 votes. The incredibly stupid AP article by Brian Bakst that is discussed by Lott was run by the Star Tribune over the weekend and is accessible here. Perhaps some day someone will explain how it is that a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland writing for FOX News has just eaten the lunch of the Minnesota press corps that is toying with this story, but we can probably figure that out on our own. JOHN adds: Based on my own research, I'm convinced that the two big increases in Franken's total that have been clearly reported on--Mountain Iron Precinct 1 and Partridge Township--are legitimate. The Coleman campaign sent a representative to Mountain Iron today to get to the bottom of that 100-vote jump, but the "corrected" totals look right in the context of the other races in Precinct 1 and the results in Precinct 2. I'll report further if the campaign comes up with anything, but if the revised total were wrong there should be a Republican election judge jumping up and down, and no such thing has been reported. I don't know what the story is in Two Harbors, but the one Franken bump that is clearly dubious is the 30-plus absentee ballots that a Democrat ostensibly discovered in the back seat of her car. There is no way that should happen. There is, I suspect, much more of the same to come Source:http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,449334,00.html

As of this morning, Norm Coleman leads Al Franken by 206 votes in the results reported for the Minnesota Senate seat at issue this year. The mandatory recount is to begin next week. Hennepin County includes the city of Minneapolis and its suburbs. It is Minnesota's most populous county. One of our readers served as an election judge on November 4 for a precinct in Hennepin County and writes to reiterate a point we have previously noted: As "machine judge" it was my duty to set up and take down the voting machine. I still find it very surprising that there has been no attention to the issue pertaining to problems with transmitting the election results in Hennepin county. I followed up with other city authorities and confirmed what I had heard. The way the process is to work is that the voting machine or optical scanner is set up in the morning and a tape is run that is left in the machine showing a zero sum total for all the candidates. The polls are then opened and the ballots are fed in throughout the day. There is a counter on the machine which shows how many ballots have been counted, so that a comparison to the number of ballots used can be made. At the end of the day, the polling location is closed, and the absentee ballots are then addressed and fed into the machine. Once all this is done, we must close out the totals. This entails a number of steps, one of which is transmitting the results. There is a modem in each of the voting machines which can dial up the county and send the results before the official tape is printed within the machine. This offers a level of security as the results are now off site, and the Official Tape with the totals is still at the precinct. What happened on election night was Hennepin County set up the wrong IP address for all the machines in the county. There was no way to transmit the results to a secure off site location. Instead all the precinct's needed to pull the electronic cards out of the machine, along with the tape, and head to City Hall to consolidate and then have them sent to the County. This means that one person had all the voting results and ballots in their possession for that precinct. So it certainly dropped the level of security a level. So in my mind the process was not followed, and the integrity of the procedure was flawed, if not corrupted. I personally recorded the totals from my precinct to view and ensure they were recorded properly, however some judges after working 16 hours, may not have felt the need to be as diligent, nor hang around to the very end. A cynic could say something could have been swapped out in the process. Someone should be asking Hennepin County officials and [Minnesota Secretary of State] Mark Ritchie, why the transmission of votes from these machines did not work. and how can they ensure the integrity of all the vote totals without this added step. I really believe this needs to be addressed. This system did not work as it was designed and someone needs to explain why. I can't find any report of the events raised by our reader in the local press. If accurate, it is an important element in the story now being played out. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The single most illuminating account of the shifting Coleman-Franken election results that I have found since the numbers started moving after 100 percent of precincts had reported Wednesday morning is this column by John Lott: When voters woke up on Wednesday morning after the election, Senator Norm Coleman led Al Franken by what seemed like a relatively comfortable 725 votes. By Wednesday night, that lead had shrunk to 477. By Thursday night, it was down to 336. By Friday, it was 239. Late Sunday night, the difference had gone down to just 221 -- a total change over 4 days of 504 votes. Amazingly, this all has occurred even though there hasn't even yet been a recount. Just local election officials correcting claimed typos in how the numbers were reported. Counties will certify their results today, and their final results will be sent to the secretary of state by Friday. The actual recount won't even start until November 19. Correcting these typos was claimed to add 435 votes to Franken and take 69 votes from Coleman. Corrections were posted in other races, but they were only a fraction of those for the Senate. The Senate gains for Franken were 2.5 times the gain for Obama in the presidential race count, 2.9 times the total gain that Democrats got across all Minnesota congressional races, and 5 times the net loss that Democrats suffered for all state House races. Virtually all of Franken's new votes came from just three out of 4130 precincts, and almost half the gain (246 votes) occurred in one precinct -- Two Harbors, a small town north of Duluth along Lake Superior -- a heavily Democratic precinct where Obama received 64 percent of the vote. None of the other races had any changes in their vote totals in that precinct. To put this change in perspective, that single precinct's corrections accounted for a significantly larger net swing in votes between the parties than occurred for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, or state house races. The two other precincts (Mountain Iron in St. Louis county and Partridge Township in Pine county) accounted for another 100 votes each. The change in each precinct was half as large as the pickup for Obama from the corrections for the entire state. The Minneapolis Star Tribune attributed these types of mistakes to "exhausted county officials," and that indeed might be true, but the sizes of the errors in these three precincts are surprisingly large. Indeed, the 504 total new votes for Franken from all the precincts is greater than adding together all the changes for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, and state house races combined (a sum of 482). It was also true that precincts that gave Obama a larger percentage of the vote were statistically more likely to make a correction that helped Franken. The recent Washington State 2006 gubernatorial recount is probably most famous for the discovery of ballots in heavily Democratic areas that had somehow missed being counted the first and even second time around. Minnesota is already copying that, though thus far on a much smaller scale, with 32 absentee ballots being discovered in Democratic Hennepin County after all the votes had already been counted. When those votes are added in, they seemed destined to cut Coleman's lead further. Indeed, it is probably through the discovery of new votes that Franken has his best shot of picking up new votes. Despite the press pushing a possible replay of election judges divining voters' intentions by looking at "hanging chads" to see if voters meant to punch a hole, that shouldn't be an issue in Minnesota. The reason is simple: optical scan vote counting machines return ballots to voters if no vote is recorded for a contested race. The Associated Press piece with the title "Most Minn. Senate 'undervotes' are from Obama turf" misinformed readers about what undervotes really imply. The Minneapolis Star Tribune headline similarly claimed "An analysis of ballots that had a vote for president but no vote for U.S. senator could have recount implications." Voters themselves insert their ballot into the machine that reads and records their votes, and if the machine finds that a vote isn't recorded, voters can either mark the race that they forgot to mark or didn't mark clearly. Or if voters "overvoted" and accidentally marked too many candidates, voters can also get a fresh ballot. There should be no role to divine voters' intentions. If a voter wanted a vote recorded for a particular race, the machine tells him whether his vote in all the races was counted. But voters also have the right not to vote in particular races. In this election, 0.4 percent of Minnesotans didn't want to vote for president. The number for the Senate race was only slightly higher at 0.8 percent. For congressional and state House races, the rates were 3 and 3.5 percent. This pattern of fewer people voting in less important elections has been observed as long as people have studied elections. There are always at least a few people who don't vote for even the most closely contested races at the top of the ballot and fewer people follow and vote for races the farther down the ballot that you go. But this is not evidence of mistakes, quite the contrary. With ACORN filing more than 43,000 registration forms this year, 75 percent of all new registrations in the state, Minnesota was facing vote fraud problems even before the election. Even a small percentage of those registrations resulting in fraudulent votes could tip this election. To many, it just seems like too much of a coincidence that Minnesota's one tight race just happens to be the race with the most "corrected" votes by far. But the real travesty will be to start letting election officials divine voter's intent. If you want to discourage people from voting, election fraud is one sure way of doing it. Since Lott wrote his column, Coleman's margin has shrunk yet again. As of this evening, the Minnesota Secretary of State's site reports that Coleman's margin over Franken has shrunk from 221 to 206 votes. The incredibly stupid AP article by Brian Bakst that is discussed by Lott was run by the Star Tribune over the weekend and is accessible here. Perhaps some day someone will explain how it is that a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland writing for FOX News has just eaten the lunch of the Minnesota press corps that is toying with this story, but we can probably figure that out on our own. JOHN adds: Based on my own research, I'm convinced that the two big increases in Franken's total that have been clearly reported on--Mountain Iron Precinct 1 and Partridge Township--are legitimate. The Coleman campaign sent a representative to Mountain Iron today to get to the bottom of that 100-vote jump, but the "corrected" totals look right in the context of the other races in Precinct 1 and the results in Precinct 2. I'll report further if the campaign comes up with anything, but if the revised total were wrong there should be a Republican election judge jumping up and down, and no such thing has been reported. I don't know what the story is in Two Harbors, but the one Franken bump that is clearly dubious is the 30-plus absentee ballots that a Democrat ostensibly discovered in the back seat of her car. There is no way that should happen. There is, I suspect, much more of the same to come

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Nov 7, 2008 -> 07:36 PM) The Star-Tribune has an analysis from the MN race of where the majority of the undervotes came from in the Senate Race relative to the Pres. Race. Unsurprisingly, they mostly came from counties Obama won. Typically, you sort of expect 1st time voters to have a higher undervote rate, especially with those sorts of machines, because they may not mark them completely or accurately. The recount will look at many of those by hand to go after voter intent. You cannot have a recount take into account voter intent on optical scanner machines. The machine tells you if you undervoted before you o.k. your ballot. Hence, no need to deem voter intent; unless.... you WANT to deem voter intent... for say 207 more votes.

QUOTE (Texsox @ Nov 11, 2008 -> 07:39 AM) In other words, more of the same. We have to do it, or so the conservatives tell me. When businesses fall on hard times they cut staff. Why do govt's not follow that logical path? Also, today's Trib says Illinois may run an $800+ million deficit next year. I am waiting to hear how they will fix that. Also, how long before dipsh** Stroger says the revenue from his genius sales tax increase is not matching their estimates? And how many of his familyand friend will he lay off?

Granholm was present. WHY? Because of her expertise in high taxes, or high unemployment?

Anybody see Nobel Prize Winner Krugman say we need another stimulus package. $600 BILLION DOLLARS. WTF!!!

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Nov 7, 2008 -> 10:44 AM) fpo you too!!! My keyboard was frozen.

Didn't the California Supreme Court o.k. the wording of the proposition a couple of months ago in a 4-3 decision? And if so, how silly will they look if they overrule themselves within months of oking the measure. Granted this is California.

rtgrthtjhwryjhnwythrtw;gpkqer fpo

Wait till Wall Street lays off another 50-75000 people. Schumer and Clinton will be crying for money to keep the state from going broke. But that's o.k. because we'll get that money back. Evil Wall Street and their million dollar bonuses will disappear, and with it so too will thousands of jobs that rely on those bonuses.

QUOTE (mr_genius @ Nov 5, 2008 -> 11:32 PM) sounds like another crappy hit piece on McCain. i'll pass. By NEWSWEEK? Come ON.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Nov 5, 2008 -> 07:17 PM) More rumors I saw on Olbermann (lol, I swear it's my wife who watches it, not me): Gates to stay on for a few months for continuity to eventually be replaced by Chuck Hagel for Defense, Caroline Kennedy for UN ambassador, Colin Powell for Education. All rumors of course. How about Vallas for Sec. Ed?

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Oct 30, 2008 -> 12:30 PM) no no. McCain doesnt say Obama is being negative. He says how dare Obama attack this average citizen..... which is being used as a political prop by the McCain Campaign. Hypocracy if you ask me. "We'll exploit the hell out of him... name a campaign tour after him.. but dont investigate him. He's off limits". Investigate him by using police computers and trying to find out if he is delinquent on child support payments?

QUOTE (Steff @ Oct 30, 2008 -> 12:27 PM) Why are they still using this guy? He owes back taxes, isn't a licensed plumber, and is in no position to own his own business - which is his claim to fame concern, no? And isn't he related to someone connected to McCain also or was that bs? He doesn't need a license, Obama's treasurer owes back taxes too and what a fool he is to want to own his own business someday.

He had me at the waving wheat.” LOL.