Maine GOP Chief Discovers there are Black People in his state, calls it “Voter Fraud”

November 15th, 2012 | Posted by Jim Cook in Media | Moral Values | Politics | Republicans - (1 Comments)

Last year, Maine Republican Party Chairman Charlie Webster claimed that the presence of college students at the polls was evidence of “voter fraud,” and he threatened to have the students investigated and charges filed. After Webster’s bluster wound down, an investigation by the Maine Secretary of State proved his claims of “voter fraud” to be utterly without evidence.

Now Maine Republican Party Chairman Charlie Webster has “discovered” voter fraud again. This time, what’s his proof?

The presence of black people in Maine.

That’s not a joke. Robert Long of the Bangor Daily News reports on Webster’s remarks, linking directly to a video interview of Webster to substantiate his quotes:

“In some parts of the state, in rural parts of the state there were dozens, dozens of black people who came in to vote on Election Day,” declared Webster. When confronted with the fact that there are in fact dozens of black people in the state of Maine, Webster retorted that “the selectmen and town clerks did not know who they are…. If you lived in a small town, you would know that if a black person or Chinese person comes to vote, it would seem odd.”

Got that? According to the Maine GOP Chairman, if you’re black in the state of Maine and town officials don’t know you personally, you must be committing “voter fraud.”

In other news, the conservative Washington Times wonders aloud why everybody seems to believe the “prevailing myth in American political culture that the Republican Party hates black people.”

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Liberal Bias in the Media? 4thEstate Research Shows That’s Poppycock

August 30th, 2012 | Posted by Jim Cook in Election 2012 | Media | Mitt Romney - (0 Comments)

An analysis of presidential campaign news coverage on print, television and radio by analytics outfit 4thEstate demonstrates convincingly that the story about “liberal media bias” is hogwash:

4thEstate analysis of news commentary shows that liberal media bias is a myth

Republican voices are getting more airtime in the “liberal media.”
Negativity toward Mitt Romney is getting voiced less in the “liberal media,” even by supposedly “liberal” papers like the New York Times.

It’s not a “liberal media.” It’s a corporate media, and who could be more corporate friendly than Mitt Romney?

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Las Vegas Tea Party Spreads Fib About MoveOn.org and SEIU Banning Flags

May 4th, 2011 | Posted by Jim Cook in Liberty | Politics | Republicans | State and Local - (5 Comments)

The Las Vegas Tea Party posted an urgent message on April 11, 2011:

Go Vote No on Banning the American Flag!
11 Apr 2011 By vadooling

Go to FOX and vote NO on banning the American flag in America VOTE !!! This is disgusting, to put it mildly. Your voice needs to be heard.

This is just sickening. Only 76.15% have voted on the FOX poll to NOT ban the flag in school and something like 18.0% voted YES, to ban it. What is going on in this country??

Fox is running a poll about whether the flag should be banned in schools in order not to inflame Hispanic students. The poll is being sandbagged by SEIU and we should mount a counter action if you agree with me that the flag should be taken down for no one.

Moveon.org, funded by George Soros, Organizing for America , and SEIU, “Service Employee International UNION”, have been twittering today to go to Fox Poll and vote to BAN the American Flag and right now it is still working (18%).

It’s time to SHOW THEM WHAT TRUE PATRIOTS BELIEVE!!!

GO HERE NOW: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/05/06/american-flag-banned-america/

VOTE………and then pass it along! Please!

A simple fact check shows that the Las Vegas Tea Party claim is not true. The complete set of twitter posts by Moveon.org on April 11, 2011:

MoveOn.org Tweets, April 11 2011

And the complete set of twitter posts by the SEIU on April 11, 2011:

SEIU Tweets on April 11 2011

None of those “tweets” has anything to do with schools banning flags. There’s no evidence whatsoever that either Moveon.org or the SEIU has suggested banning American flags in public schools.

That doesn’t keep the Las Vegas Tea Party or other Republican-leaning groups and individuals from posting this rumor as “news.” Take Todd Kinsey, president of the Galveston County Young Republicans, self-appointed Tea Party spokesman, and Secretary of the Galveston Republican Network. Kinsey has done some “investigation” into the claim that Moveon.org and SEIU want to ban the American flag from public schools:

Galveston Texas Republican Activist Todd Kinsey makes accusations about SEIU, Moveon.org and banning flags in public schools

Kinsey’s “proof?” A tweet that is not from SEIU’s twitter account, and that links as reference to Fox News and to another tweet by Sherry Marquez, who describes herself as “Christian/Wife/Mom/Grandma/True Republican/Councilwoman/NRA Member”. There’s your first hint that this is not an actual SEIU tweet.

In case you needed a second hint, here’s a direct SEIU denial and denunciation of the rumor:

SEIU and the Fox News Flag Poll

I got an email saying SEIU, MoveOn.org and Organizing for America have been asking people to vote in a Fox News Poll to ban the flag! Is it true?

No. First of all, that’s ridiculous. We would never encourage people to vote to ban the American flag. The email is very much like the infamous “Barack Obama is a Muslim” emails pushed around during the presidential campaign.

We also don’t often drive traffic to Fox’s website either, so that should have been a red flag as well.

But they say it was on Twitter and you tweeted about it, so it must be true!

Here’s our Twitter account – http://www.twitter.com/seiu – where we have never and would never tweet asking people to ban the flag. And while you’re there, make sure to follow us. Thanks.

Why would someone do this to you?

Mostly because people are trying to silence and discredit a leading voice for working families in this country. SEIU is a 2.2 million member organization dedicated to lifting workers up and helping them achieve the American Dream. The corporatist right will stop at nothing to discredit the work our union does for working families.

The ban-the-flag claims about Moveon.org and the SEIU are untrue, and they don’t even make sense to people who know those organizations, but that won’t stop organs and representatives of the Tea Party and the Republican Party from promiscuously spreading the fibs as far as they can. They have to find some way to stoke your outrage before they ask for a donation, and they assume that you won’t bother to check facts first. If you’ve made your way here, you’ve proven their assumption to be wrong. Thanks for exercising due diligence. Please spread the word; let your less-diligent friends know that this claim is a fraud.

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Harming Marriage How? Iowa Divorces Down since Same-Sex Marriage Legalized

August 8th, 2010 | Posted by Jim Cook in Liberty | Politics | Sex and Gender | State and Local - (1 Comments)

In April of 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage would henceforth be legal in the state of Iowa. Since then, gay and lesbian people in Iowa have had the same right to marry as their straight peers.

Straight through this year’s arguments in court regarding California’s Proposition 8, opponents of same-sex marriage have continued to assert that the legalization of same-sex marriage will devastate heterosexual marriages by “deinstitutionalizing” heterosexual marriage. The prediction of self-professed expert David Blankenhorn and others is that where same-sex marriages are legalized, divorces will rise as people throw up their hands, decide marriage doesn’t mean anything anymore, and leave their former spouses twisting in the wind.

But a funny thing’s happened since the Iowa Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in April 2009. The CDC has released divorce statistics for the state of Iowa through November 2009. From May 2009 (the month after legalization) through November 2009 (the latest month for which divorce stats are available), there were 4322 divorces in Iowa. During the same May-November period in 2008, there were 4574 divorces in the state.

That’s a drop in the number of Iowa divorces since the legalization of same-sex marriage there. That’s the opposite of what the anti-gay forces said would happen. Reality simply isn’t matching the rhetoric.

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Reality, Meet the Maine GOP

July 9th, 2010 | Posted by Jim Cook in Environment | Politics | Republicans | Science | State and Local - (0 Comments)

Maine Republican Party, meet Reality:

The Independent Climate Change Email Review was set up by the University of East Anglia (UEA) after more than 1,000 e-mails were hacked from its servers. Climate “sceptics” claimed the e-mails showed that UEA scientists manipulated and suppressed key climate data. But these accusations are largely dismissed by the report. The review found nothing in the e-mails to undermine Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. The review, chaired by former civil servant Sir Muir Russell, has spent months reading submissions sent in by climate scientists and their critics and interviewing key players, notably scientists within the university’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). It concludes that “their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt”….

Critics have alleged that the unit’s scientists withheld temperature data from weather stations and also kept secret the computer algorithms needed to process the data into a record of global temperature. The review concludes these allegations are unfounded. “We find that CRU was not in a position to withhold access to such data or tamper with it,” it says. “We demonstrated that any independent researcher can download station data directly from primary sources and undertake their own temperature trend analysis.” Writing computer code to process the data “took less than two days and produced results similar to other independent analyses. No information from CRU was needed to do this”. Sir Muir commented: “So we conclude that the argument that CRU has something to hide does not stand up”.

Asked whether it would be reasonable to conclude that anyone claiming instrumental records were unavailable or vital code missing was incompetent, another panel member, Professor Peter Clarke from Edinburgh University, said: “It’s very clear that anyone who’d be competent enough to analyse the data would know where to find it. “It’s also clear that anyone competent could perform their own analysis without let or hindrance.”…

The inquiry found no evidence that CRU researchers distorted the peer review process employed by scientific journals, or unduly influenced IPCC reports by ignoring research papers that contradicted their own findings.

This is the third and most comprehensive review into the CRU issue, and has reached similar conclusions to the previous two.

Maine GOP, meet Reality:

NOAA Global Mean Temperature Chart, 1880-2010

Reality, meet the Maine GOP:

To promote the General Welfare… investigate collusion between government and industry in the global warming myth, and prosecute any illegal collusion.

Why don’t you two get acquainted? Clearly, you have a lot to talk about.

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Embryonic Brain Development and the Myth of 40 Days

October 2nd, 2008 | Posted by Jim Cook in Liberty | Politics | Science - (3 Comments)

Hang around anti-choice activists long enough (or let them hang out long enough around you), and you’ll hear one say something like this:

Brain waves have been recorded at 40 days on the Electroencephalogram.

The medium-form version of the claim goes something like this (see Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish):

40 days: Brain waves can be measured with an Electronencephalogram
(Today we declare someone to be legally dead when his brain waves cease. So if the end of brainwaves marks the legal end of life, perhaps the start of brainwaves should mark the legal start of life?)

Our commenter and the religious St. Carmel website are both cribbing off of this passage, which you can find cut and pasted with only minor variations on multiple websites and letters to the editors of small-town papers across the country:

Is he aware that the brain waves of a developing baby are recorded at 40 days gestation on the EEG? (H. Hamlin, “Life or Death by EEG.” Journal of the American Medical Association, Oct.12, 1964.) Brain function is reliably present on the EEG at eight weeks gestation. This is six weeks after conception. (J. Goldenring, “Development of the Fetal Brain,” New England Journal of Medicine, Aug. 26, 1982, 564.)

Looks good, doesn’t it? I mean, golly gee whizzikers, the text cites the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine with academic formatting and everything! The people who wrote the text of this claim depend on that. They depend on you to not look any further.

Unfortunately for the purveyors of this text, Margaret Sykes has done the work to look into the matter, digging not only into the Hamlin and Goldenring publications but also into the citations that Hamlin and Goldenring themselves make. Hamlin made a speech and Goldenring wrote a letter — neither is peer-reviewed and neither is a research paper. Neither Hamlin nor Goldenring cite research demonstrating that “Brain waves have been recorded at 40 days on the Electroencephalogram.”

Even if those “brain waves” were demonstrated to be present, that wouldn’t equal cognition. The current state of knowledge regarding fetal brain development indicates that higher-order cognitive development occurs quite late in gestation, and certainly nowhere near as far back as 40 days. According to the National Institutes of Health, the brain doesn’t even differentiate into as many as five separate areas until 6-7 weeks after conception. At 8 weeks after conception, the fetal brain spans less than a 1/4 inch across (Mayo Clinic). It is not until 30 weeks that the brain begins to develop grooves and indentations that we associate with a fully-cognitive brain.

The claim made by those who cite the Hamlin and Goldenring publications as if they were scientific research is inappropriate. It is unsubstantiated. It is a myth.

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Poll: Women’s March from Clinton to McCain is a Myth

June 9th, 2008 | Posted by Jim Cook in Barack Obama | Democrats | Election 2008 | Politics | Republicans | Sex and Gender - (0 Comments)

A representative poll of 3,000 respondents by Scott Rasmussen taken over the past three days finds that 52% of women support Barack Obama, while just 40% of women support John McCain. According to Rasmussen, that’s a wider gender gap in favor of the Democrat than John Kerry enjoyed in 2004.

This is not to say that there aren’t any women marching straight from the Clinton camp over to John McCain. Clearly, there are, and they’re being featured on national TV. But to say that this is an overall trend of significance would seem to be the promotion of a myth.

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