Barack Obama’s campaign is receiving increasing complaints about scam pollsters involved in dirty tricks operations to discredit the Democratic candidate.
Victims claim the fake pollsters work insinuations into their questions, designed to damage Obama. Those targeted in swing states such as Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania include Jews, Christian evangelicals, Catholics and Latinos.
One of those to protest, Debbie Minden, who lives in a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood, Squirrel Hill, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, told the Guardian that the pollster had begun by asking her the usual questions about her background and who she would vote for.
But the pollster went on to ask Minden, who is Jewish, how she would vote if she knew that Obama was supported by Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that runs Gaza and was responsible for most of the suicide bombings against Israel. “It is scare tactics. It is terribly underhand,” she said.
The groups behind such polls have not been identified. One of the Republican groups working on behalf of John McCain’s campaign, the Republican Jewish Coalition, acknowledges carrying out a survey about Jewish voters’ views on Obama and Israel but insists it had been a legitimate exercise intended to test campaign messages on Jewish voters.
The RJC angrily dismissed comparisons between its exercise and a “push poll”, the technique of using fake surveys to sway voters. Its poll was restricted to 750 people whereas push polls usually involve phoning thousands of people. It asked 82 questions, only 10% of which were devoted to Obama.
The technique of push polling is part of the election battle being fought on the ground in the swing states where the margins of victory have been narrow in past elections.
On a bigger scale, teams from each campaign are engaged in legal fights over who is entitled to vote, with Republican groups trying to have people in largely Democratic neighbourhoods disqualified.
Push polling was used with stunning effect in the 2000 Republican primary campaign in South Carolina when people claiming to be pollsters insinuated that McCain, then fighting George W Bush for the party nomination, had illegitimately fathered a black child. Bush overturned McCain’s double-digit poll lead, and the origin of the calls was never fully established.
This year, the tactic surfaced again during the Republican primaries when calls were made highlighting the religion of one of the candidates, Mitt Romney – he is a Mormon, a religion viewed with suspicion by some on the Christian right.
An Obama campaign organiser in one of the swing states said there had been lots of complaints about push polling in his patch. Callers said questions frequently included a reference to the widespread belief that Obama is a Muslim, even though he has repeatedly said he is a Christian.
The organiser said another question was: would you be less likely to vote for Obama if Israel had to give up all of Jerusalem? “They make this shit up. They are good at it. The unassuming listener will not realise it is untrue,” he said.
Minden, a school psychologist, was not surprised to be polled. “It sounded like a normal poll. Was I voting? Demographics? Age? Where we live? Then a question about which party I supported, who I preferred on the economy, on foreign policy, questions like that.
“They said; ‘Are you Jewish?’ and I said ‘Yeh’. Then they said ‘if you knew Barack Obama was supported by Hamas, would it change your vote? Would it change your vote if you knew his church had made antisemitic statements?’. All the hot button issues on Israel.” She said she will vote for Obama as planned.
In Key West, Florida, another swing state, Joelna Marcus, 71, a retired professor, had a similar experience. She was asked if she would be influenced if she learned that Obama had donated money to the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
The Huffington Post website reported that a reader, named Rachel from Strongsville, Ohio, complained of a push poll that portrayed Obama as a radical left-winger who had voted to let convicted child sex offenders out early and to allow them to live near schools.
ed. note: I thought this was instructive
TBS, carrying all first-round MLB playoff games, filled out its announcer lineup card Sunday. And despite the mediagenic Chicago Cubs playing the Los Angeles Dodgers, TBS figures the Boston Red Sox-Los Angeles Angels series is the TV star and will send its top on-air team — Chip Caray and Buck Martinez — to cover it.
With Caray and Martinez traveling to call the Red Sox-Angels opener Wednesday, TBS’ Dick Stockton, Ron Darling and Harold Reynolds — for his American League familiarity — would call that tiebreaker. Then, TBS will have 3½ hour TV windows for each game.
On Wednesday (all times ET):
•Milwaukee-Philadelphia (3 p.m.) gets Brewers local announcer Brian Anderson and longtime Atlanta announcer Joe Simpson helping break in TV rookie and longtime Braves pitcher John Smoltz in a three-man booth.
•Dodgers-Cubs (6:30 p.m.) gets Stockton, Darling and Tony Gwynn.
•Red Sox-Angels (10 p.m.) gets Caray and Martinez. Expect lower worker productivity in Boston on Thursday morning.
On Thursday, Minnesota/White Sox at Tampa Bay (2:30 p.m.) will get Red Sox local announcer Don Orsillo and Reynolds. Then, the on-air crews will remain intact for Brewers-Phillies (6 p.m.) and Dodgers-Cubs (9:30 p.m.).
TBS executive producer Jeff Behnke says the top crew of Caray and Martinez might “parachute in” to another series if their Red Sox-Angels series ends quickly.
With additional reporting by Vanessa Juarez
Remember all those worries about an actors’ strike if the union didn’t get the deal it wanted from the conglomerates? Well, it’s far from over, folks. Yesterday, the Screen Actors Guild’s negotiating committee issued a recommendation that its National Board call for a strike authorization vote from the 120,000 members. The union cannot walk the picket line until 75 percent of members who vote on the issue say it is okay. The National Board is set to meet Oct. 18.
SAG is the lone holdout still negotiating a new contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (its previous deal expired in June). Guilds for the writers, directors, and daytime actors all signed new pacts with the major studios in the last year. Internet residuals continue represent a key sticking point in SAG’s stalled talks with the AMPTP. According to the advisory motion approved by the negotiating committee, “Negotiators…have requested that the , return to the bargaining table to negotiate a fair deal, and the AMPTP…has refused to change their position and continued to refuse to meet to attempt to advance the negotiations.”
The AMPTP responded by questioning whether this was really the time to talk about going on strike, especially given the dire situation on Wall Street. “Not only is the business suffering from recent economic decisions, but if ever there was a time when Americans wanted the diversions of movies and TV, it is now,” the AMPTP said in a statement. “The DGA, the WGA, and AFTRA reached agreements on comparable terms months ago, during far better economic times, and it is unrealistic for SAG negotiators now to expect even better terms during this grim financial climate. This is the harsh economic reality, and no strike will change that reality.”
Another major Hollywood strike so soon after last year’s Writers Guild of America work stoppage would be devastating to the economy in Los Angeles, where one in 10 jobs is said to be in the creative sector. As it is, Bloomberg News just reported that foreclosures in L.A. have tripled, and a strike would not only affect those who directly work in the entertainment industry, but those who make a living off of the biz peripherally, like interior designers and architects, for example.
TroyGould attorney and former WGA counsel Jonathan Handel, who has been blogging about the negotiations for quite some time, believes that a work stoppage now would be a risky roll of the dice by SAG. “A strike would almost certainly cause the studios to withdraw the offer on the table, and what SAG would get at the end of a long and bitter dispute is likely to be worse, or little better, than what they could get now. What SAG needs to do is close a deal promptly and live to fight — or strike — another day: mend the relationship with AFTRA, build closer alliances with the WGA, train its members to circumvent the studios by writing, directing, and producing their own new media productions, then come back strong in three years.”
BY John Tully
October 8 2002
The Los Angeles Sun—
Politics is not a pretty thing.
Look no further than this week in Washington D. C. Former Vice-president Albert Gore Jr. finally brought up the huge marsupial in the room. Criminy! folks, that’s gonna’ wake the whole herd up mate!
Senate Leader Tom Daschle, who seemed to have stashed his opinions in a lock box this summer finally blew his top on the Senate floor denouncing President Bush’s comment at a recent fundraiser that the “Senate” is more interested in “special interests” than in the Security Of Americans. That very same fundraiser pushed the President past Bill Clinton’s record of $126 million raised in one year and it’s only the last week of September.
Stepping right up to the plate this week was a small group of Senators who have been all too quiet this summer with any dissent of this administration’s dual War On Terrorism and Iraq. In fact the debate on war had bipassed “if” and went straight through to “when” and “who’s with us” by the time Mr. Gore finally cleared his throat Monday in San Francisco. Actual questions were raised about our effectiveness in toppling Saddam and how to proceed post-war in Iraq among others.
Sen. Robert Byrd paced and shook with disdain as he read Bush’s remarks from the newspaper on the senate floor. Sen. Daschle’s voice broke as he defended his colleagues, spoke of members who have served in the military and demanded an apology from the President. He also spoke of not politicizing the nation’s debate. It was a classic case of “too little,too late”
Back in June an internal G.O.P. playbook, authored by White House political strategist Karl Rove got into the hands of the opposition. The Powerpoint presentation suggested Republican candidates play up the “War” to keep the political dialogue on their side of the fence.The relative silence of the Democrats this summer only strengthened the resolve of the true hawks in the administration and a bipartisan resolution for war will almost definitely be passed by both houses. For GOP candidates however, the strategy might not pay off.
A new poll released this week shows that while the majority of Americans are for action against Iraq, three out of five want our allies to sign on. Colin Powell would like to go back to the Security Council soon with a joint resolution from the United States Congress and it looks as if he will have it. Unfortunately for the Republicans, this momentary truce focuses the debate back onto the domestic front where, as usual, it is the Economy…stupid.
Crikey! The bugger just ate his own heed!
Politics is not a pretty creature.
BY JOHN TULLY
THE LOS ANGELES SUN
FEB 23 2005
A weekend journalism-school reporter, using a fake name, was given access to the President of the United States at White House press briefings before he even worked for any news organization.
He claims that he has seen a confidential, so-called C.I.A. document which reveals the name of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife and shows her recommending him for the trip to Niger to investigate yellowcake uranium sales to the Iraqis.
It turns out that Secret Service has been waving James Guckert by the guardhouse for two and a half years and once inside, he became Jeff Gannon. He wrote for a fake website, Talon News, run by Republican strategist Bobby Eberle and the organization GOPUSA.
To understand how something like this could Not be a story, that this could happen to begin with, is to understand how The District of Columbia really runs. However, one can only watch and wait as the laws of physics begin to rear their ugly head. Try as they might and for whatever reason, The Mainstream Media (as good of a description as any) just can’t keep this monster down.
Howard Kurtz, the longtime and wise sage media critic with The Washington Post, trusted by little old Quaker ladies in Cleveland Park D.C. and lobbyists alike, just could not figure out what the big fuss was all about and immediately chalked it up to over-eager WWW types and their preoccupation with the salacious part of the story.
Oh that.
The Great Diversion and the reason why non-political junkies in America are apparently not talking about this story is that this fella’ publicly advertised his services as a male prostitute on numerous sites on the Internet and registered and launched numerous gay male pornographic websites.
Really.
CNN’s Aaron Brown, so brilliant in his earlier years on the old ABC overnight news program, pooh-poohed the scandal as a bit of “so what”. On Wolf Blitzer’s “Hard News” program, Mr. Guckert/Gannon was treated almost softly, as if not to upset.
The New York Times finally ran the story, deep in the back pages on Friday, Feb 11th, more than a week after website journalists began to fully reveal this fake journalist’s deceptions.The shockjock mentality came out instantly in the groupthink mainstream media with a curious mix of apathy and frat-boy jokes.
There was no outrage to be outraged over. Meanwhile, writers on web sites like The Daily Kos, David Brock’s Media Matters and John Aravosis’s America Blog, among others, had been doing their own journalism and found out that Mr. Guckert was not who or what he appeared to be. They started their dig after witnessing a press briefing by the President back in late January. A strange reporter asked a clearly partisan question / pronouncement that, among other things, stated that the Democrats were “divorced from reality”.
They got dirt all right.
Columnists Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd finally had to write cute pieces about the mess nearing the end of last week. Katie, Matt, and The Today Show eventually did a quick three- minute story in the first hour last Wednesday. Radio man Don Imus couldn’t get anyone to bite and wondered aloud about the titillating aspect of the thing.
This was now more than ten days since the story had broken, or hadn’t broken. No one was even discussing, outside of the Web, the nasty business of the C.I.A. memo that Mr.Guckert had claimed to have seen or knew about right there on Mr. Blitzer’s show.
Links to web sites where Mr. Guckert solicited clients for sex were widely available at the very same time Mr. Blitzer was tripping all over himself to give Mr. Guckert an Easypass.
Ultimate Washington insider Mary Matalin, Vice President Cheney’s sometimes consultant, told Imus that she just wished Ms. Dowd would just come in from the cold and get with the program.
Why did President Bush and Scott McClellan, the President’s spokesman, call on Mr. Guckert/Gannon so often in those two and a half years and how could other reporters not write about Talon News and GOPUSA’s illegitimacy? Veterans of the White House beat sometimes don’t see a question for years. Was he a plant?
But just like the high school sophomores that they are, the Washington Press Corps have hemmed and hawed and giggled their way for weeks now through a real-live genuine scandal unfurling at the White House. Waving their collective finger, they dismissed the whole affair in full. It was simply The Bloggers and their liberal retribution for the Rather/CBS assassination and a lurid fascination with the X-rated angle thrown in for good measure.
Now the simply idiotic Bush-Tapes story, along with a long weekend and a brilliant fake-outrage campaign over a congressman’s comments about Karl Rove, is threatening to bury forever a story that the entire profession of journalism would like to pretend was never born to begin with.
Everyone seems to be looking around at each other and tsk-tsking the lack of outrage on each other’s part, as if to say “This is terrible -someone do some real reporting”.
“Someone did – as Mr. Bush would say, on the “Internets”.
Stay Tuned.
© 2005 THE LOS ANGELES SUN
ALSO IN:
DISSIDENT VOICE
SMIRKING CHIMP
NEIL ROGERS SHOW
PULSE TWIN CITIES
BARTCOP
“Howard Kurtz, the longtime and wise sage media critic for The Washington Post, trusted by little old Quaker ladies in Cleveland Park D.C. and lobbyists alike, just could not figure out what the big fuss was all about and immediately chalked it up to over-eager WWW types and their preoccupation with the salacious part of the story”
Thursday, October 2, 2008
(10-02) 08:39 PDT MAMMOTH LAKES — The wreckage of a plane found near Mammoth Lakes has been confirmed to be that of missing adventurer Steve Fossett, authorities said today.
No body has been found, but investigators said a preliminary investigation showed that the plane Fossett had been piloting slammed into a the west side of the Minaret mountain range in the Inyo National Forest at the 9,700-foot elevation, about seven miles west of Mammoth Lakes. The wreckage was initially spotted late Wednesday by a Yosemite National Park helicopter.
“It was a head-on crash into the side of a mountain, into a rock,” Madera County Sheriff John Anderson said at a news conference. “The plane disintegrated. We found the engine 300 feet from the fuselage.”
Fossett is believed to have died in a plane crash after taking off on a pleasure flight from a private airport in Yerington, Nev. south of Reno on Sept. 3, 2007.
“The crash looked so severe, I doubt anyone could have walked away from it,” Anderson said. Nevertheless, “It’s our job to try to locate the remains and take care of those. The family deserves our best effort,” he said.
There was no black box aboard the plane, Anderson said. Fossett’s view may have been obstructed by clouds, and his instruments may not have shown that he was approaching a mountain, the sheriff said, adding however that the cause of the crash is under investigation.
Some 50 searchers and five dogs are continuing to comb the site of the wreckage in the Sierra Nevada, Anderson said. The National Transportation Safety Board has joined local, state and federal officials at the scene.
The confirmation came three days after Preston Morrow, the manager of Kittredge Sports in Mammoth Lakes, found Fossett’s pilot’s license, a glider license and a membership card for the National Aeronautic Association while day-hiking with Kona, his Australian shepherd mix, in the forest.
Morrow, 43, said today that he started his hike at Devil’s Post Pile and took the Minaret Lake Trail up into the mountains. He was hoping to reach an abandoned mine, but it got late and he gave up. But he then came across the ID cards and money. Authorities believe the money belonged to Fossett.
Morrow didn’t know what he had found at first. It wasn’t until Tuesday that he realized it was Fossett’s name on the documents. He and his wife decided to go back to the site to get coordinates for the area. His wife found a sweatshirt, and he notified authorities.
Morrow, his face showing early-morning stubble, shook his head sadly this morning as he listened to the sheriff confirm that the plane was Fossett’s.
“I woke up this morning at 3 a.m. wondering, ‘Wow, did I really do that? Did I find that stuff?’ I’m very happy that I can help. I found the haystack, and there was that little needle they needed to go back and get,” Morrow said. “I’m glad they did. I’m so relieved, so happy that they found something. Now they can put an end to it, I hope. Maybe the family can get some closure.”
Morrow said he didn’t immediately give the cards to the police because he wanted to get the exact coordinates of his find first.
Page said he didn’t believe Fossett’s widow, Peggy, would be addressing the media.
Morrow said he conducted a television interview at 4 a.m. today and was on the air with Sir Richard Branson, a close friend of Fossett and fellow adventurer. Branson thanked him for finding the debris.
“It was a thrill,” said Morrow, who confirmed that he is unused to such mass attention.
The ID cards were found about a quarter-mile from the plane, Anderson said. It’s possible that they landed there as a result of the impact, authorities said.
California Highway Patrol officers had flown over the general area 19 times, said Jeff Page, director of the Lyon County Office of Emergency Services in Nevada, where the original missing persons report for Fossett was filed. There had been a number of unconfirmed sightings of possible wreckage immediately after Fossett disappeared, but they were among hundreds of tips that came in, Page said.
Page said he wasn’t surprised that the wreckage hadn’t been spotted before. “It’s very heavily forested with trees and brush,” Page said.
Officials had said last year when the search was suspended that they believed the wreckage would only be discovered by a hiker coming across debris by happenstance.
“We pretty much assumed something would be found either in hunting season or the peak hiking season,” said Lyon County sheriff’s Lt. Rob Hall. “And that’s how it worked.”
The original search area encompassed 25,000 square miles, one of the biggest searches in U.S. history.
Page noted that the wreckage was found nearly 200 miles south of the focus of the original searches. He shook his head as he described how search teams had been focusing their efforts in the wrong place.
“They were wrong, I guess,” Page said. “So were the psychics from last year and the mind-readers and all the others who jumped in.”
U.S. 395, the highway Fossett was known to fly along, passes close to Mammoth Lakes as it snakes from Canada to the Mojave Desert. Fossett had been flying in the area searching for dry lake beds where he could attempt a planned land speed record. The Sierra Nevada lakes in the area being searched are generally filled with water, said U.S. Forest Service.
Fossett vanished after taking off for a morning solo jaunt in an acrobatics-style Bellanca Super Decathlon airplane from the swanky private airport – the Flying M Ranch – of his friend, hotel mogul Barron Hilton. He carried just a bottle of water on board.
The initial search teams tried to follow tips from sightings on the ground and partial radar trackings, and then scoped the hunt out to a huge area taking in most of the south-middle portion of rugged, desert Nevada. Three private teams took a cut at the hunt this summer, also with no success.
The adventurer was world-renowned for setting 115 flying and sailing records, including being the first to fly around the Earth alone without refueling. The wealthy financial broker had also swum the English Channel and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, leading his friends to say that if anyone could survive an air crash, he could.
The last fatal crash in the area happened on Dec. 21, 2006, when a Piper plane crashed near a road in the bottom of a canyon near Big Pine. A flight instructor and student were killed in the crash, which happened when they decided to fly up a box canyon at low altitude and hit the ground, the safety board said.
Chronicle staff writer Henry K. Lee contributed to this report. E-mail Kevin Fagan at kfagan@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/02/BAEU13A99B.DTL
E O N L I N E
By Josh Grossberg
Get ready for another helping of Phish.The legendary jam band, who called it quits in August 2004 with a blowout two-day festival in Vermont, has confirmed plans to reunite for three shows next March in Hampton, Va.
Per a time-lapse video announcement posted on the band’s website, Phish will take the stage of Hampton Coliseum—the surreal, spaceshiplike venue that’s hosted some of the band’s most memorable gigs—on March 6, 7 and 8.
The site also says Phish will unveil additional 2009 tour dates early next year.
While pop success often eluded them during their 21 years together, the quartet of singer-guitarist Trey Anastasio, keyboardist Page McConnell, bassist Mike Gordon and drummer Jon Fishman was one of the top touring acts of the 1990s and early 2000s, known for high-energy, innovative and downright marathon live performances.
Since 1989 Phish has played more than 475 concerts, grossing a whopping $175 million in revenue and selling nearly 6 million tickets, according to Billboard. In doing so, Vermont’s Phinest amassed a carnival-like neo-hippie following akin to the Grateful Dead.
Phish announced it was taking a year-and-a-half-long hiatus in 2000 and returned on Dec. 31, 2001, with a New Year’s Eve show at Madison Square Garden, followed by three more dates at Hampton Coliseum.
But the road took its toll and Phish called it quits in 2004.
Since then the foursome has been exploring solo careers, with Anastasio being the most visible member. But his music was overshadowed of late by his legal problems stemming from substance abuse issues.
Rumors began to spawn that Phish would regroup last May, when the rockers surfaced in New York to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Jammys.
Three of the four were also spotted playing together on stage at the Rothbury festival in Michigan on the Fourth of July, and the full band reportedly played three songs at the wedding of their former road manager earlier this month.
Tickets for the March Hampton dates will go on sale to the general public Oct. 18. But Phishheads get first dibs, with a limited number of tickets available via the band’s site now through Oct. 8.
The New York Herald Sun 