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Sheesh, whatever happened to the hack for the sake of the hack? You need to read today's article in the New York Times on the MIT Media Lab.

This is why math professors should stick to math. (Note that I'm a math major, so perhaps I should as well. ;)

Not that the longwinded article linked here actually got around to talking about Natapof's "proof" in any detail, but from what I could piece together, all he proved is that under an electoral college system, each voter has a greater chance of deciding the election with his or her vote than under a direct election.

Well no shit, Sherlock. That's why we're sitting here watching a recount come in dozens of votes at a time, arguing about a couple hundred blind old ladies, and fretting about whether more Floridians overseas are serving in the military or dual citizens of Israel. OF COURSE a smaller number of voters has a larger chance of deciding an election under the electoral college system.

In other words, the e.c. is considerably more unstable and capricious than a direct election. There is a much greater chance that the true will of the people will not be reflected in the final result. Why we need a mathematical proof to investigate this is not totally beyond me, because it's an interesting combinatorial result (I'd assume). Why this Natapof guy actually thinks this is a good thing, though, is utterly ridiculous.

His best argument (according to the article) is that we don't complain that the World Series is determined by who wins the most games, not who scores the most runs. Putting aside the fact that the two situations are *not* analogous (for one thing, the fact that there is a different starting pitcher for any given 4-5 games in a row is the most important argument for why we need a best-of-7 Series), the point here is that the World Series is put on for the purposes of *entertainment*, not of deciding who rules the free world. Not that I'm not having a lot of fun with these election results (side note--I helped elect a corpse! Whaddya think of that!), but there's an argument to be made that instability and lack-of-representation in results, while good for sporting events, are actually *bad* for presidential elections.

Furthermore, he shows absolutely no understanding of the greater "rules" of the electoral college "game". For example, the electoral college has, throughout the course of US history, served to prolong and promote slavery and remove incentives for granting female sufferage or encouraging higher voter turnouts. For some excellent explanation why, why don't we read a *relevant* article by someone who's actually qualified to talk about the electoral college, Akhil Reed Amar (Yale professor and one of the foremost academic experts on Constitutional law).

Friedman quotes a new book by Hernando de Soto, which concludes that "good political institutiions and property law" are the ingredients that have consistently enabled entrepreneurs in the West to succeed, and their absence elsewhere explains why others fail.

If there is no incentive for hard work then nothing will be created. Please, don't raise the canard of "give the content away to create a market for the server" or other schemes which have been disproven in the marketplace.

Friedman quotes a new book by Hernando de Soto, which concludes that "good political institutiions and property law" are the ingredients that have consistently enabled entrepreneurs in the West to succeed, and their absence elsewhere explains why others fail.

If there is no incentive for hard work then nothing will be created. Please, don't raise the canard of "give the content away to create a market for the server" or other schemes which have been disproven in the marketplace.

While it's true that the entire election hinges on Florida right now, it's incredibly interesting to note the role that Nader played in the margins. these states below were considered "swing states" that really could make a difference. consider how thin the margin was in each, compared to the total votes Nader drew:

(# electoral votes - State - Gore's margin of victory/loss - Nader's total vote)

=== Gore Wins ===
23 - Pennsylvania (PN) - 196,000 - 102,000
11 - Wisconsin (WI) - 5,000 - 28,000
7 - Iowa (IA) - 4,000 - 28,000
11 - Washington (WA) - 89,000 - 69,000
18 - Michigan (MI) - 204,000 - 81,000

=== Gore loses ===
11 - Tennessee (TN) - (-79,000) - 20,000
6 - Arkansas (AR) - (-40,000) - 12,500
11 - Missouri (MO) - (-79,000) - 38,000

=== in play ===
7 - Oregon (OR) - (-21,000) - 54,000
25 - Florida (FL) - (-1800) - 97,000

main points:

1. Nader wasn't a real threat in Pennsylvania, which was a critical state for Gore. Gore won a decisive victory.
2. Nader almost cost Gore Wisconsin and Iowa - Gore's margins were so thin there that he probably won only by "Green Guilt" (Nader voters thankfully convinced that their vote for Nader was indeed a vote for Bush). Also, it is VERY likely that "vote swapping" played a KEY role in the results from these states, because the various swapping sites on the internet report a combined total of ~10 - 15,000 participants.
3. Gore grabbed Washington and Michigan despite the Nader threat, a large enough margin that Nader probably wasn't a real threat.
4. The three states that Gore lost which he had been counting on (TN, AR, MO) were lost by large enough margins that even Nader's votes woudln't have helped. Had Gore managed to win these states he woudl have not needed Florida.
5. Oregon is being slightly spoiled, according to latest results. But Oregon isn't as critical now since WA and MI went to Gore.
6. Florida is being HUGELY spoiled! look at the tiny margin - less than 2,000 votes - and compare it to Nader. This is also exactly how WI and IA could have gone, except that even taken together they only have 18 votes and FL has 25.

Assume that 40% of Nader votes were spoiled from Gore and 60% were not going to vote for Gore anyway (these estimates are conservative, based on some exit polling info on TV). Then in Florida, that means Gore could have had (Nader votes x 40%) = (97,000 x .40) = ~35,000 votes. That's nearly *20 times* as many votes as the margin.

What does this all mean? It shows how close the election hinged. Gore could have easily lost WI and IA as well, which would have cost him the election right there. It's very possible that vote-swapping is what saved WI and IA for Gore. Florida is still in play by the thinnest margin in history, because of SEVERE Nader spoiling.

So, if Gore loses, it's because of Nader (who publicly promised to not campaign in swing states, but broke his word). If Gore wins, it's quite likely that it was won in WI and IA for him by vote-swappers :)

(data from MSNBC. conclusions and analysis from mybutt.com)

ooh, another cool article from New York Times:

As I type this, some of my coworkers are having a pleasant "isn't this interesting" discussion about the election--not that they're discussing the above factoid, of course: who reads newspapers? Much more entertaining to watch Dan Rather spout corny homespun similes all night on the idiot box. At any rate, I don't dare open my mouth; flames would come out. I probably shouldn't even be posting. I'm beyond the point where I can be calm and civil about this.

The candidates' positions were readily available to anyone who paid attention. I am absolutely livid that the next president of the US is being chosen by an electorate that is largely asleep at the wheel.

I've said this before, but: in a society where we believe that voting is both a duty and a right, why do so many people feel they have no responsibility to actually understand the issues they're voting on? No matter which way this election goes, I'm disgusted.

Turns out this is the first election where ALL the networks get their exit poll data from a single source.

Can you say monopoly?

I'm not bashing anyone's right to vote. However, I must criticize what appears to be a blind acceptance of everything that Nader says, as if he is the guru of the disenfranchised masses everywhere.

Nader has used the (oft repeated) phrase "Republicrats" to describe his opponents, suggesting that there is NO difference. Think about it. Do some research and don't just blindly accept what Ralph is trying to push down your throats. Anyone remember the EPA or OSHA under Reagan? Completely gutted. Think that won't happen again? Remember, Bush thinks that global warming is an unsubstantiated theory. Bush rejected an increase of the minimum wage. Tax theory? At least under Clinton the Earned Income Tax Credit did something for American;s in lower income brackets. Oh, and those Congressional races you are all voting in have a LOT more to do with these policies getting through than the President.

Make no mistake - voting for Nader increases Bush's chances. Do not delude yourself for one moment. There are no conservatives who are voting for Bush. Think Nader cares? In an interview with the New York Times in which he stated that he stated that Bush might actually be better for the U.S. in the long run since pollution will increase for the short term, thus bringing more people into the Environmental movement. Better to let the environment get worse so it can eventually improve? How 'bout voting for the party that is actually trying to get it from getting worse in the first place! Doesn't anyone on the Nader side have a problem with this? Maybe a few hundred thousand acres in Alaska is a small price to pay?

Vote. First and foremost. No matter who you vote for, just vote. But if you are going to vote for Nader, please at least do a little research on the man, his personal investments, his personal stances on unions, etc. Being a sheep for the Green Party is no better than being a sheep for the "Republicrats."

You're absolutely right that Gore is not really much better than Bush when it comes to debt reduction. But let's not kid ourselves: Greenspan supports debt reduction (i.e. doing nothing), and Bush made it sound as if Greenspan supports tax cuts instead.

As for privatization of pension funds (a totally separate point), I'm all for it except that Bush has promised to continue paying out current obligations without giving any indication where that money will come from. You can't divert incoming payments to private accounts and at the same time use them to do what you were doing before (paying existing obligations).

What else do you expect from an economist? And anyway, as we all know, it's not up to him, so this whole discussion is somewhat moot.

I guess my final dig at Bush is that newspaper pieces across the country have pointed out that if you take Bush's numbers at face value, the monies he promises to various groups adds up to way over the monies he started with. That makes it very hard for me (a mathematician) to take Bush's numbers at face value.

http://partners.ny tim es.com/2000/11/02/technology/02COMP.html

I do recommend reading the article though if you are not a die hard well versed chess watcher, it has some interesting history about the players.

In case anyone wanted more information about the backround behind this, The New York Times Online has an informative article about it here (free reg. req.). It turns out that Vladimir Kramnik, the winner of this match, was taken on as a student at the age of 11 by Mr. Kasparov at his elite chess school in Moscow. I still think that Kasparov is the best player out there right now, though. He may have lost this one championship match but being the champion for 15 years allows for a few mistakes. Still, I think that it was very impressive that Kramnik was able to defeat him, where no one else had been.

Me, I'm voting for Bush, since I think we all deserve a tax break, not just those of us who engage in whatever behavior the government wants to encourage....

Christ on a crutch, you really think you will get a tax break worth lifting your eyelids to see from a Dubya Administration? Mr. Bush plans to hand out a huge honking tax slash extravagnza to all the people who are millionaires already and don't even know now how to spend all the money they've got, and for you, guy-who-works-for-a-wage, you'll get some trifling little bonus that isn't worth half the value of this or that existing government program, which you rely upon, that he plans to dig out from underneath your feet.

Don't take my word for it because a.) I am nobody and b.) you can't believe everyone you read on the Internet, obviously. But would you grant any authority to, say, a full professor of economics at MIT? who is also a regular columnist for the New York Times? I mean, you might not agree with such a fellow on every nuance of policy but will you not go along with the notion that here, at least, is a man who can add?

This MIT professor is named Paul Krugman, and if you have the stomach to put up with the NYT web site's totally annoying password nonsense, then please examine this column from October 1st,, entitled "Oops! He Did It Again" which contains (short "fair use" quote, thank you) the following:

...Needless to say, honest accounting is a given. After all, the interviewers do their homework -- they would pounce on any obviously wrong numbers.

But I guess some people get special treatment.

I really, truly wasn't planning to write any more columns about George W. Bush's arithmetic. But his performance on "Moneyline" last Wednesday was just mind-blowing. I had to download a transcript to convince myself that I had really heard him correctly. It was as if Mr. Bush's aides had prepared him with a memo saying: "You've said some things on the stump that weren't true. Your mission, in the few minutes you have, is to repeat all of those things. Don't speak in generalities -- give specific false numbers. That'll show them!"

Note that this isn't Krugman's first column on the numerical anomalies in Mr. Bush's proposed budget, it's just the others scrolled off the NYT web page by now. Krugman goes on from there; concluding:

...Is there any way to explain away Mr. Bush's remarks -- three major self-serving misstatements in the course of only a couple of minutes? Not that I can see. We're not talking questionable economic analysis here, just facts: what Mr. Bush said to that national television audience simply wasn't true...

While I'm quoting Krugman, here is his column of the 25th of October, a cheery little note entitled "Fuzzier and Fuzzier" which ends on this upbeat note:

Indeed, the motto for this election year -- and the epitaph for the soon-to-be-departed budget surplus -- should be: Real men don't think. Unfortunately, what you refuse to think about can till hurt you.

If you began paying into SS last year, excuse me for annoying you with my trivial personal concerns. I've been paying into SS for thirty years. Believe it or not I would be very displeased to find out, in the unlikely event that I live to retirement age, that I will get no money back because the so-called Social Security Trust Fund has been handed over, in the main, to millionaires and stock-jobbers.

I expect certain things from slashdot readers, which I would not expect from randomly selected members of the general public. In this case, specifically, a decent respect for the laws of arithmetic. You can't expect the average guy to know or care too much about numbers, but, like, "news for Nerds," right? The point to all this typing, then, is that Duh-byuh's stuff just plain doesn't add up.

It follows then that somewhere in the big scheme of things, certain promises will not be kept. There are 800 or so people have contributed $95-million out of $100-million his election campaign has brought in. Mr. Bush has promised their social class, in which he also personally enjoys membership, a vast and majestic tax cut. Also Mr. Bush has promised you, Mr. Nobody #26,981,102, and me, Mr. Nobody #165,220,748, some trifling sort of tax relief. Now assume Mr. Bush gets elected President. Also assume, optimistically, that the laws of arithmetic continue to hold into the near future. Then one of those two groups - the campaign contributors, or the nobodies, is in for a letdown.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

Me, I'm voting for Bush, since I think we all deserve a tax break, not just those of us who engage in whatever behavior the government wants to encourage....

Christ on a crutch, you really think you will get a tax break worth lifting your eyelids to see from a Dubya Administration? Mr. Bush plans to hand out a huge honking tax slash extravagnza to all the people who are millionaires already and don't even know now how to spend all the money they've got, and for you, guy-who-works-for-a-wage, you'll get some trifling little bonus that isn't worth half the value of this or that existing government program, which you rely upon, that he plans to dig out from underneath your feet.

Don't take my word for it because a.) I am nobody and b.) you can't believe everyone you read on the Internet, obviously. But would you grant any authority to, say, a full professor of economics at MIT? who is also a regular columnist for the New York Times? I mean, you might not agree with such a fellow on every nuance of policy but will you not go along with the notion that here, at least, is a man who can add?

This MIT professor is named Paul Krugman, and if you have the stomach to put up with the NYT web site's totally annoying password nonsense, then please examine this column from October 1st,, entitled "Oops! He Did It Again" which contains (short "fair use" quote, thank you) the following:

...Needless to say, honest accounting is a given. After all, the interviewers do their homework -- they would pounce on any obviously wrong numbers.

But I guess some people get special treatment.

I really, truly wasn't planning to write any more columns about George W. Bush's arithmetic. But his performance on "Moneyline" last Wednesday was just mind-blowing. I had to download a transcript to convince myself that I had really heard him correctly. It was as if Mr. Bush's aides had prepared him with a memo saying: "You've said some things on the stump that weren't true. Your mission, in the few minutes you have, is to repeat all of those things. Don't speak in generalities -- give specific false numbers. That'll show them!"

Note that this isn't Krugman's first column on the numerical anomalies in Mr. Bush's proposed budget, it's just the others scrolled off the NYT web page by now. Krugman goes on from there; concluding:

...Is there any way to explain away Mr. Bush's remarks -- three major self-serving misstatements in the course of only a couple of minutes? Not that I can see. We're not talking questionable economic analysis here, just facts: what Mr. Bush said to that national television audience simply wasn't true...

While I'm quoting Krugman, here is his column of the 25th of October, a cheery little note entitled "Fuzzier and Fuzzier" which ends on this upbeat note:

Indeed, the motto for this election year -- and the epitaph for the soon-to-be-departed budget surplus -- should be: Real men don't think. Unfortunately, what you refuse to think about can till hurt you.

If you began paying into SS last year, excuse me for annoying you with my trivial personal concerns. I've been paying into SS for thirty years. Believe it or not I would be very displeased to find out, in the unlikely event that I live to retirement age, that I will get no money back because the so-called Social Security Trust Fund has been handed over, in the main, to millionaires and stock-jobbers.

I expect certain things from slashdot readers, which I would not expect from randomly selected members of the general public. In this case, specifically, a decent respect for the laws of arithmetic. You can't expect the average guy to know or care too much about numbers, but, like, "news for Nerds," right? The point to all this typing, then, is that Duh-byuh's stuff just plain doesn't add up.

It follows then that somewhere in the big scheme of things, certain promises will not be kept. There are 800 or so people have contributed $95-million out of $100-million his election campaign has brought in. Mr. Bush has promised their social class, in which he also personally enjoys membership, a vast and majestic tax cut. Also Mr. Bush has promised you, Mr. Nobody #26,981,102, and me, Mr. Nobody #165,220,748, some trifling sort of tax relief. Now assume Mr. Bush gets elected President. Also assume, optimistically, that the laws of arithmetic continue to hold into the near future. Then one of those two groups - the campaign contributors, or the nobodies, is in for a letdown.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

Me, I'm voting for Bush, since I think we all deserve a tax break, not just those of us who engage in whatever behavior the government wants to encourage....

Christ on a crutch, you really think you will get a tax break worth lifting your eyelids to see from a Dubya Administration? Mr. Bush plans to hand out a huge honking tax slash extravagnza to all the people who are millionaires already and don't even know now how to spend all the money they've got, and for you, guy-who-works-for-a-wage, you'll get some trifling little bonus that isn't worth half the value of this or that existing government program, which you rely upon, that he plans to dig out from underneath your feet.

Don't take my word for it because a.) I am nobody and b.) you can't believe everyone you read on the Internet, obviously. But would you grant any authority to, say, a full professor of economics at MIT? who is also a regular columnist for the New York Times? I mean, you might not agree with such a fellow on every nuance of policy but will you not go along with the notion that here, at least, is a man who can add?

This MIT professor is named Paul Krugman, and if you have the stomach to put up with the NYT web site's totally annoying password nonsense, then please examine this column from October 1st,, entitled "Oops! He Did It Again" which contains (short "fair use" quote, thank you) the following:

...Needless to say, honest accounting is a given. After all, the interviewers do their homework -- they would pounce on any obviously wrong numbers.

But I guess some people get special treatment.

I really, truly wasn't planning to write any more columns about George W. Bush's arithmetic. But his performance on "Moneyline" last Wednesday was just mind-blowing. I had to download a transcript to convince myself that I had really heard him correctly. It was as if Mr. Bush's aides had prepared him with a memo saying: "You've said some things on the stump that weren't true. Your mission, in the few minutes you have, is to repeat all of those things. Don't speak in generalities -- give specific false numbers. That'll show them!"

Note that this isn't Krugman's first column on the numerical anomalies in Mr. Bush's proposed budget, it's just the others scrolled off the NYT web page by now. Krugman goes on from there; concluding:

...Is there any way to explain away Mr. Bush's remarks -- three major self-serving misstatements in the course of only a couple of minutes? Not that I can see. We're not talking questionable economic analysis here, just facts: what Mr. Bush said to that national television audience simply wasn't true...

While I'm quoting Krugman, here is his column of the 25th of October, a cheery little note entitled "Fuzzier and Fuzzier" which ends on this upbeat note:

Indeed, the motto for this election year -- and the epitaph for the soon-to-be-departed budget surplus -- should be: Real men don't think. Unfortunately, what you refuse to think about can till hurt you.

If you began paying into SS last year, excuse me for annoying you with my trivial personal concerns. I've been paying into SS for thirty years. Believe it or not I would be very displeased to find out, in the unlikely event that I live to retirement age, that I will get no money back because the so-called Social Security Trust Fund has been handed over, in the main, to millionaires and stock-jobbers.

I expect certain things from slashdot readers, which I would not expect from randomly selected members of the general public. In this case, specifically, a decent respect for the laws of arithmetic. You can't expect the average guy to know or care too much about numbers, but, like, "news for Nerds," right? The point to all this typing, then, is that Duh-byuh's stuff just plain doesn't add up.

It follows then that somewhere in the big scheme of things, certain promises will not be kept. There are 800 or so people have contributed $95-million out of $100-million his election campaign has brought in. Mr. Bush has promised their social class, in which he also personally enjoys membership, a vast and majestic tax cut. Also Mr. Bush has promised you, Mr. Nobody #26,981,102, and me, Mr. Nobody #165,220,748, some trifling sort of tax relief. Now assume Mr. Bush gets elected President. Also assume, optimistically, that the laws of arithmetic continue to hold into the near future. Then one of those two groups - the campaign contributors, or the nobodies, is in for a letdown.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

Me, I'm voting for Bush, since I think we all deserve a tax break, not just those of us who engage in whatever behavior the government wants to encourage....

Christ on a crutch, you really think you will get a tax break worth lifting your eyelids to see from a Dubya Administration? Mr. Bush plans to hand out a huge honking tax slash extravagnza to all the people who are millionaires already and don't even know now how to spend all the money they've got, and for you, guy-who-works-for-a-wage, you'll get some trifling little bonus that isn't worth half the value of this or that existing government program, which you rely upon, that he plans to dig out from underneath your feet.

Don't take my word for it because a.) I am nobody and b.) you can't believe everyone you read on the Internet, obviously. But would you grant any authority to, say, a full professor of economics at MIT? who is also a regular columnist for the New York Times? I mean, you might not agree with such a fellow on every nuance of policy but will you not go along with the notion that here, at least, is a man who can add?

This MIT professor is named Paul Krugman, and if you have the stomach to put up with the NYT web site's totally annoying password nonsense, then please examine this column from October 1st,, entitled "Oops! He Did It Again" which contains (short "fair use" quote, thank you) the following:

...Needless to say, honest accounting is a given. After all, the interviewers do their homework -- they would pounce on any obviously wrong numbers.

But I guess some people get special treatment.

I really, truly wasn't planning to write any more columns about George W. Bush's arithmetic. But his performance on "Moneyline" last Wednesday was just mind-blowing. I had to download a transcript to convince myself that I had really heard him correctly. It was as if Mr. Bush's aides had prepared him with a memo saying: "You've said some things on the stump that weren't true. Your mission, in the few minutes you have, is to repeat all of those things. Don't speak in generalities -- give specific false numbers. That'll show them!"

Note that this isn't Krugman's first column on the numerical anomalies in Mr. Bush's proposed budget, it's just the others scrolled off the NYT web page by now. Krugman goes on from there; concluding:

...Is there any way to explain away Mr. Bush's remarks -- three major self-serving misstatements in the course of only a couple of minutes? Not that I can see. We're not talking questionable economic analysis here, just facts: what Mr. Bush said to that national television audience simply wasn't true...

While I'm quoting Krugman, here is his column of the 25th of October, a cheery little note entitled "Fuzzier and Fuzzier" which ends on this upbeat note:

Indeed, the motto for this election year -- and the epitaph for the soon-to-be-departed budget surplus -- should be: Real men don't think. Unfortunately, what you refuse to think about can till hurt you.

If you began paying into SS last year, excuse me for annoying you with my trivial personal concerns. I've been paying into SS for thirty years. Believe it or not I would be very displeased to find out, in the unlikely event that I live to retirement age, that I will get no money back because the so-called Social Security Trust Fund has been handed over, in the main, to millionaires and stock-jobbers.

I expect certain things from slashdot readers, which I would not expect from randomly selected members of the general public. In this case, specifically, a decent respect for the laws of arithmetic. You can't expect the average guy to know or care too much about numbers, but, like, "news for Nerds," right? The point to all this typing, then, is that Duh-byuh's stuff just plain doesn't add up.

It follows then that somewhere in the big scheme of things, certain promises will not be kept. There are 800 or so people have contributed $95-million out of $100-million his election campaign has brought in. Mr. Bush has promised their social class, in which he also personally enjoys membership, a vast and majestic tax cut. Also Mr. Bush has promised you, Mr. Nobody #26,981,102, and me, Mr. Nobody #165,220,748, some trifling sort of tax relief. Now assume Mr. Bush gets elected President. Also assume, optimistically, that the laws of arithmetic continue to hold into the near future. Then one of those two groups - the campaign contributors, or the nobodies, is in for a letdown.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

• first, it lasted three months, and there was talk that not only was source downloaded, but it might have been modified
• then, it was for six weeks, and MS was sure that no source was modified
• now, it was only one week, and source was only "viewed", not downloaded, and to a minor "future product" at that.

What's going on? Well, it seems like MS's PR department has been working hard to downplay the attack. Notice how the informant shifts over time from an unnamed "Microsoft engineer" to Balmer to MS's "corporate security officer." I assume that what happened went like this: 1) a mid-level MS engineer leaked the real story to the press, 2) PR (Balmer) steped in for damage control, and finally 3) PR propped up a puppet with a written script to try and kill the issue.

The thing is, the strategy may backfire on MS. Now, they can't claim that open source developers are pirating their code. They've already gone on record saying no MS code exists in the wild. Which means that if you happen upon the source to Office, you are free to look at it, since MS has already declared that that code does not exist.

Heh.

• first, it lasted three months, and there was talk that not only was source downloaded, but it might have been modified
• then, it was for six weeks, and MS was sure that no source was modified
• now, it was only one week, and source was only "viewed", not downloaded, and to a minor "future product" at that.

What's going on? Well, it seems like MS's PR department has been working hard to downplay the attack. Notice how the informant shifts over time from an unnamed "Microsoft engineer" to Balmer to MS's "corporate security officer." I assume that what happened went like this: 1) a mid-level MS engineer leaked the real story to the press, 2) PR (Balmer) steped in for damage control, and finally 3) PR propped up a puppet with a written script to try and kill the issue.

The thing is, the strategy may backfire on MS. Now, they can't claim that open source developers are pirating their code. They've already gone on record saying no MS code exists in the wild. Which means that if you happen upon the source to Office, you are free to look at it, since MS has already declared that that code does not exist.

Heh.

http://channel.nyti mes .com/2000/10/27/technology/27SILI.html

You can read the article at (without registering):

http://partners.nytimes.com/2000/10/27/technology/ 27SILI.html

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/27MICRO SOFT.html

The Reichstag Fire analogy is relevant in my view.

Gore probably did more than you and Bush combined towards getting the internet as widespread today as it is.

As you can see from this review by the NY Times tecnology section, they pretty much all do.

Oh, if you don't like registration, try this link instead.

As you can see from this review by the NY Times tecnology section, they pretty much all do.

Oh, if you don't like registration, try this link instead.

The Tom Paine article is almost a month old, so take it with a grain of salt. Today's NY Times says Nader may be "spoiling" in California...

Okay. What makes this study any more credible than the several other reports that contradict it? Because JonKatz says it's right?
--

In any NYTimes url, simply replace the "www" with "partners" and you don't have to sign in.

For example: http://partners.nytimes.com/2000/10/23/opinion/23M ONK.html

Simple, huh? But obviously too complicated for the fucking morons who post these stories.

D.

PS: And why doesn't CmdrTacky fix that damned bug that arbitrarily puts spaces into URLs which form part of the text of comments?

True... unless, of course, you use the ever-popular partners.nytimes.com link to the story instead.

free reg. req

The other (non-reg) NYT link

1Alpha7

The net can "turn a child's heart dark and murderous". The net is just another form of media, and it has the same disadvantages that other media has.

Fifteen minutes with a web-browser brings up some of the real "FACTS" behind several of your items. I don't have time to check them all -- I wish you had done it before posting:

FICTION: Al Gore said his father, a senator, was a champion of civil rights during the 1960's.

FACT: Gore's father voted against the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and was a racist who was fond of using the "N" word.

I assume you're refering to the Washington Post's article from back in April, though I've never seen any mention of Al Sr. being "fond of using the 'N' word"! Here's the full quote from the Post article:

Long before Bill Clinton came along, Gore lived in the shadow of another dominant politician, his father, Sen. Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee. Many of the deepest tensions of American race relations were played out during the long career of Sen. Gore, whose opposition to the segregated ways of his native South angered many of his constituents and eventually led to his political demise. With one notable exception, when he capitulated to regional sentiment and opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the choices he made over more than three decades in Washington were courageous -- and they provided lasting lessons in the political education of the son. If there are as many ways of looking at Al Gore on the issue of race as Wallace Stevens found to look at a blackbird, the first views, shading all the rest, including his relationship with Clinton, come from the life and times of his parents.
(no longer available for free from the Post, but a reprint is available at http://www.jessejacksonjr.o rg/ issues/i042300173.html)

FICTION: Al Gore claimed the book "Love Story" was based on his life and Tipper's.

FACT: Author Erich Segal called a press conference to deny his claim. (Couldn't he at least lie about a love story where his sweetheart doesn't die?"

This is actually an older story that first started circulating in 1997. Here's the actual article from the time about Erich Segal's supposed "denial."

"When the author Erich Segal was asked about Gore's impression, he stated that the preppy hockey-playing male lead, Oliver Barrett IV, indeed was modeled after Gore and Gore's Harvard roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones." (Original from December 1997 NYTimes no longer available on-line. Similar article at the Chicago Tribune http://chicagotribune.com/news/metro/chicago/print edition/article/0,2669,SAV-0008280152,FF .html )

FICTION: While running for office, Gore's campaign literature claimed he was a "Brilliant Student".

FACT: Washington newspapers said he barely passed Harvard and consistently earned D's and C's.

What are these mythical "Washington newspapers" you keep citing? Give me an actual cite, ferkrisakes.

In this case, you're talking about this article from the March 18 Washington Post. Gore did get one D, some C's, and a B his first year, but his grades moved up from there, and he was generally an A and B student his senior year. He graudated cum laude (a far cry from "barely passing") based on the strength of his thesis. Here's a quote from the article:

In his junior year, he earned a B, a B-plus and an A-minus in three government courses, and he aced his senior government thesis on the impact of television on the presidency, a strong finish that made him a cum laude graduate. His devotion to the subject by then was so intense that he gave much of his time to a not-for-credit seminar with his favorite professor, Richard Neustadt, an expert on the presidency.

-- Adam

Why is slashdot still linking to www.nytimes.com when partners.nytimes.com works without registering, and this is widely known, and has been pointed out numerous times here?

http://partners.nytimes.com/2000/10/19/technology/ 19XERO.html

Here is the non-registration version of the story link.

OK?

You mean the non-registration URL of this link, right?

So sue him.

Yes, it is the perfidy. Like when Bush says:

• In the October 12 debate he claimed that all three perpetrators of the murder of James Byrd Jr. were to be executed, and cited this as evidence of his hard stance against hate crimes. In fact, he was wrong about the record. Only two were given capital sentences (source: NYT). Had there been a hate crimes law, all three would have been given capital sentences.

• In yesterday's debate, he claimed that national rates of health care coverage were falling while Texas' were rising. This was his rejoinder to Gore's question as to why Texas was 50th in the nation for family health care coverage. In actuality, Texas' rate of health care coverage has steadily declined during every year of Bush's six year term, with the exception of a small rise last year. In Texas, health care coverage has fallen from 78.2 to 76.7% (source: US Census web site), or 1.5%. Nationwide, over the same time span, health care rates have fallen only .2%, meaning that Texas is not only 50th, but falling.

dude, if you would have actually read the article you would have noticed the link to this article in the NYTimes which gives a brief history of buckyballs.
--
lukas

The New Science of Character Assassination
Phil Agre
15 October 2000

You are welcome to forward this article electronically to anyone for any noncommercial purpose.

The past ten days will go down as a turning point in American history. This is what it's like when the far right is taking over your country: the people support Al Gore's policies, but the polls are shifting toward George W. Bush because the media is filled with false attacks on Al Gore's character. A story in today's (10/15/00) New York Times states openly what has been clear all along, that this campaign of character assassination has been planned and executed over a long period by the Republicans.
--Story Link--

Character assassination is, of course, nothing new for Republicans, who mastered the art in the days of Richard Nixon. What's new is that the press constantly repeats the lies. Not just once or twice, not just the occasional slip, but over and over and over.

Let us consider the New York Times story in detail. Written by Alison Mitchell, it describes Al Gore's abject apology for two trivial and much-exaggerated errors in the first debate as "the culmination of a skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy".

The New York Times discerns four landmarks in this campaign, and they are as follows:

• Landmark number one:

• ... in December 1997 ... the [Republican National] committee announced it had started a contest to come up with a slogan for Mr. Gore after he told reporters that the hero and heroine in the novel "Love Story" were modeled after him and his wife, Tipper. (Erich Segal, the author, soon said that his protagonist, Oliver Barrett IV, was only partly based on Mr. Gore, while Jenny Cavilleri had nothing to do with Tipper Gore.)

  In this case, the RNC's claim was false. Gore had not told anyone that Love Story was based on him and his wife. Rather, he had mentioned a newspaper article that had inaccurately said that, and was carefully to say that he only had the article's word to go on. Observe that Mitchell repeats the RNC's false account, and then (following the longstanding convention) makes it sound as though Segal was contradicting Gore, when in fact he was defending him. The false "Love Story" store continues to be repeated to the present day.
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number two:

• So when Mr. Gore said in an interview with CNN in March 1999 that "during my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet", Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, issued this mocking statement: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the paper clip".

  The problem, of course, was that Gore's claim was correct. As the Internet's scientific leaders attest, often heatedly, Gore recognized the significance of the Internet very early, and took the initiative in doing the political work and articulating the public vision that made the Internet possible. His sentence, which is often not quoted in its entirety, makes perfectly clear that he was talking about the work he did in the context of his Congressional service, and that he is not claiming, ridiculously, to have done the technical work as well. Mitchell shades the story by omitting the Republicans' (and media's) most common distortion of the matter, that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. This falsehood has been repeated on literally hundreds of occasions, and George W. Bush routinely uses it in his speeches.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number three:

• On the day Mr. Gore announced his candidacy in Carthage, Tenn., his family's hometown, Jim Nicholson, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had a more elaborate stunt. He rode in a wagon pulled by mules to the hotel on Embassy Row in Washington where Mr. Gore lived for much of his youth.

  "He has tried to pass himself off as this hardscrabble, homespun central Tennessee farm boy and that is not what he is", said Mr. Nicholson, playing off the fact that Mr. Gore had told The Des Moines Register that he had learned to slop hogs and clear land on the family farm. Friends later told reporters that Mr. Gore's father had kept him on a backbreaking work schedule during summers on the family farm.

  The problem, again, is that Gore's claim was true. He did work on his family farm as a child. This time, Mitchell admits that the Republicans were making it up. But she still shades the story by making it sound as though the truth hadn't come out until later, and as though the contrary view rests solely on the word of Gore's friends. In fact the childhood farm chores had been extensively reported for a decade. The false claim that Gore had lied about the chores was repeated on many occasions in the press.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number four:

• The Republicans got help as well from an unexpected source. When the Democratic primary fight became bitter, former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey insisted that Mr. Gore had deliberately distorted his policy positions in what he called a "pattern of misrepresentation". At one point, Mr. Bradley spat out, "Why should we believe that you will tell the truth as president if you don't tell the truth as a candidate?"

  The problem is that Bradley is endlessly quoted to this effect without any attempt to determine whether he is right. In fact Bradley often wrongly accused Gore of distorting his positions.

And that's it. That, according to the New York Times, is the story of the Republicans' campaign to paint Al Gore as an embellisher. The New York Times cites four accusations, all of them false, and in every case the New York Times either repeats the false accusations as truth or else provides misleading accounts of them.

The New York Times' article is not an aberration. The list of false attacks on Al Gore's character that have been circulated in the media for the last two years is extraordinary. In some cases, as in the ones (mis)cited by the New York Times, Gore is accused of lying when he was actually telling the truth:

• Several publications have called Gore a liar in very harsh terms because he claimed that his father was a pioneer in the civil rights movement. It is true that his father lost his nerve on the Civil Rights Act, but that does not change the overwhelming and (until recently) universally accepted evidence of his leadership on civil rights. Gore's assertion is perfectly accurate.
• 
  --Story Link--
• In probably the single most vicious attack of the entire campaign, several publications have suggested that Gore lied when claiming to have been present at his sister's death. The only evidence they offer is that he also made a political speech the same day, and Gore's driver has explained his schedule for that day in detail.
• 
  --Story Link--

In other cases, Gore's words are twisted, misquoted, or simply made up to make him sound as though he were making a claim that he was not making. For example, some publications have even claimed, falsely, that Gore literally uttered the words "inventing the Internet".
--Story Link--

There are many others:

• In the closing moments of Gore's second debate with George W. Bush, Jim Lehrer falsely accused Gore of having called Bush a "bumbler" in one of his campaign commercials.
• 
  --Story Link--

  Was this simply a mistake on Lehrer's part? Okay, but Lehrer made his "mistake" in the context of rebuking Gore for his own miniscule mistakes in the first debate.

• Gore told a a union audience that his mother had sung the "union label" song to him as a child. Gore's comment was obviously a joke and the audience took it as a joke. Yet, incredibly, numerous supposed journalists have asserted that he meant it seriously, or else tried (on no evidence) to cast doubt on Gore's obviously-true claim that it was a joke.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When Gore spoke of his proposal to put Social Security and Medicare in a "lockbox", some "journalists" accused him of dissembling on the astonishing grounds that he was not actually proposing to put the money into a physical box.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When the Washington Post finally gave up on the "Love Story" story, pretending that it had only recently been disproven, they moved to another falsehood. Gore had claimed that his sister was the first volunteer for the Peace Corps. This claim was accurate, inasmuch as his sister had in fact worked for the Corps without pay from its earliest days, only later joining its paid staff. But the Post called Gore's claim a "lie", on the grounds that she had not worked as a volunteer *overseas*, which Gore had never claimed; they did not mention that she worked without pay.
• 
  --Story Link--
• Gore told some students in New Hampshire the story of a Tennessee community activist who brought his attention to a toxic dump, whereupon he looked for other examples, found Love Canal, and held the first hearings on the issue. "Journalists" first misquoted him as having claimed to to have started the issue, when in fact he was giving credit to the activists. Even when the misquotation was grudgingly corrected, they continued to distort his words, as if he were claiming to have discovered the toxic pollution at Love Canal.

In yet other cases, Gore made a trivial error that has been exaggerated by his critics, and the exaggeration has been falsely attributed to him. Such is the case with the school in Florida that Gore cited in the first of his debates with George W. Bush.
--Story Link--

These are just a few examples among many. People make mistakes all the time. Al Gore is one of them, and it's surprising that an army of opposition researchers hasn't come up with more substantive errors after fact-checking a whole life of public statements. So is George W. Bush, whose errors during the two debates so far have been dramatically worse than those of Gore. To start with, Bush falsely implied that the Europeans have no troops in Kosovo, when in fact they have tens of thousands, and that the United States has significant numbers of troops in Haiti, when it does not. And he made numerous false statements:

• that Gore was outspending him, when the opposite was true;
• that the rate of uninsured people was falling in Texas and rising nationally, when the opposite was true;
• that the men who killed James Byrd would be put to death, when only two had been sentenced to death and their appeals had not been exhausted;
• that middle-income seniors would get drug coverage immediately under his Medicare plan;
• that Gore had lied about this;
• that the new spending in his budget plan is equal to the tax cuts;
• that "most of the tax reductions [in his plan] go to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder";
• that the president is unable to influence the actions of the Food and Drug Administration;
• that Hillary Clinton's 1993 national health insurance initiative would have entailed nationalizing health care; and
• that Gore had claimed to be the author of the Earned Income Tax Credit law.

That is just a partial list of Bush's "mistakes" in two ninety-minute debates, and it doesn't include the dubious numbers he quoted from Republicans in the Senate or the mess he made of education, taxes, Social Security, and the Middle East. Nor does it include the "mistakes" that littered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, or the especially egregious "mistakes" of his brutal campaign against John McCain in South Carolina, and so on.
--Story Link--

With only a few exceptions (like the one just cited), the press has gone to great lengths to cover up or minimize Bush's false statements. Press coverage of the first debate focused overwhelmingly on Gore's two comparatively trivial errors and on endless suggestions that Gore was rude for having sighed several times.
--Story Link--

Of course, the sighs were often exaggerated by turning the volume up. (Falsely calling someone a liar, as Bush did several times, is not rude?) Pundits bizarrely praised Bush for his command of the issues after the first debate despite his lengthy catalog of errors:
--Catalog Link--

And the 10/5/00 Washington Post buried the Democrats' list of Bush errors at the end of a long story about Bush's accusations against Gore.

The problem is systemic. A reporter for a British newspaper, the Observer, was struck at the completely different approaches of the reporters covering Gore and Bush, and reported a disturbing incident in which a Washington Post reporter well-known for her open hostility to Gore held a toy gun to his head.
--Story Link--

Indeed, press coverage of Gore has been spun in a strongly negative fashion for a long time.
--Story Link--
--Story Link--
--Story Link--

The press, following the lead of Republican "investigators", has repeatedly falsified and spun the famous Buddhist temple event, among others.
--Story Link--

They have also falsified and exaggerated Gore's performance in earlier debates, thereby creating a caricuture of him as a vicious attacker.
--Story Link--

Yes, the press has suggested that Bush is not mentally competent to run the country. But it has not fabricated huge amounts of evidence to support this charge, and it has not routinely used vocabulary that is remotely as harsh as that used against Gore. You have rarely seen the media call Bush a "moron" or "idiot", but Gore has routinely been called much worse. Here is a very partial list:

• "evil"
• "imperious&qu ot;, "repellent"
• "lethal", "ruthless", "liar"
• "ruthless", "relentless", "bully", "maniacal"
• "manipulative", "dishonest"

(I am citing the Daily Howler for most of these examples so that you can read some analysis of them. But the Howler provides precise citations for the originals, which should be easy to look up.)

Indeed, Bush's alleged mental incompetence is often tacitly used to excuse his falsehoods -- he doesn't know what he's talking about, so he can't be lying. Or Gore is accused of a "pattern" of false and exaggerated statements, but then Bush escapes the same accusation for the simple reason that nobody bothers to gather Bush's false and exaggerated statements in one place.

This is just the press. We're not even talking about the conservatives on the Internet that have been circulating long lists of Gore's supposed lies and exaggerations -- most of which are, of course, themselves lies or exaggerations, including garbled and embellished versions of the already false versions in the press. Some of these lists are credited to the RNC, but of course it is hard to know for sure.

The new science of character assassination, then, has several components:

• It starts with a strategy: a conscious choice by a political party that it is going to position its opponent in a certain way. The 10/15/00 Washington Post quotes a Republican consultant as saying that "PR 101 is define your opponent before he tries to define himself", and the whole campaign is clearly organized by the principles of PR.
• It requires a clearinghouse to distribute "facts" that fit the strategy. In this case the burden has been carried by the Republican National Committee and by the office of House majority leader Dick Armey, which got its start by circulating the original fraudulent charges from Wired News about Gore's Internet statement.
• It requires rank-and-file supporters who are willing to pass along any junk that fits the party line.
• But above all, it requires a press corps that has decided to go along with it. Part of the problem is that the press operates in packs -- an echo chamber of lazy pundits in which every "fact" that fits a prevailing stereotype gets endlessly repeated.

But it's not just that. It is not surprising that Rupert Murdoch's media properties, such as Fox and the New York Post, publish smears against people who disagree with Murdoch's far-right views. But it can hardly be an accident that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press have all assigned reporters to the Gore campaign who write, day in and day out, the same sorts of exaggerated smears. To be sure, the press is not unanimous in spreading Republican lies as truth; the contrast between the NYT/Post/AP axis and the calm reporting of the Los Angeles Times could hardly be greater. But the Post, Times, and AP, all well-connected and widely syndicated, set the tone for the press as a whole. The fix is clearly in, and these establishment media operations are clearly down with it. They see which way the wind is blowing, and they don't want to get left behind.

A kind of coup is in effect, continuing the pattern of the Whitewater hoax and impeachment. If the far right succeeds in its campaign, then the incoming government will be staffed by people who are trained in the new science of character assassination. It's all they know. And having destroyed Al Gore, they will come after the rest of us.

Copyright (c) 2000 by Philip E. Agre.
All rights reserved.

The New Science of Character Assassination
Phil Agre
15 October 2000

You are welcome to forward this article electronically to anyone for any noncommercial purpose.

The past ten days will go down as a turning point in American history. This is what it's like when the far right is taking over your country: the people support Al Gore's policies, but the polls are shifting toward George W. Bush because the media is filled with false attacks on Al Gore's character. A story in today's (10/15/00) New York Times states openly what has been clear all along, that this campaign of character assassination has been planned and executed over a long period by the Republicans.
--Story Link--

Character assassination is, of course, nothing new for Republicans, who mastered the art in the days of Richard Nixon. What's new is that the press constantly repeats the lies. Not just once or twice, not just the occasional slip, but over and over and over.

Let us consider the New York Times story in detail. Written by Alison Mitchell, it describes Al Gore's abject apology for two trivial and much-exaggerated errors in the first debate as "the culmination of a skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy".

The New York Times discerns four landmarks in this campaign, and they are as follows:

• Landmark number one:

• ... in December 1997 ... the [Republican National] committee announced it had started a contest to come up with a slogan for Mr. Gore after he told reporters that the hero and heroine in the novel "Love Story" were modeled after him and his wife, Tipper. (Erich Segal, the author, soon said that his protagonist, Oliver Barrett IV, was only partly based on Mr. Gore, while Jenny Cavilleri had nothing to do with Tipper Gore.)

  In this case, the RNC's claim was false. Gore had not told anyone that Love Story was based on him and his wife. Rather, he had mentioned a newspaper article that had inaccurately said that, and was carefully to say that he only had the article's word to go on. Observe that Mitchell repeats the RNC's false account, and then (following the longstanding convention) makes it sound as though Segal was contradicting Gore, when in fact he was defending him. The false "Love Story" store continues to be repeated to the present day.
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number two:

• So when Mr. Gore said in an interview with CNN in March 1999 that "during my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet", Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, issued this mocking statement: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the paper clip".

  The problem, of course, was that Gore's claim was correct. As the Internet's scientific leaders attest, often heatedly, Gore recognized the significance of the Internet very early, and took the initiative in doing the political work and articulating the public vision that made the Internet possible. His sentence, which is often not quoted in its entirety, makes perfectly clear that he was talking about the work he did in the context of his Congressional service, and that he is not claiming, ridiculously, to have done the technical work as well. Mitchell shades the story by omitting the Republicans' (and media's) most common distortion of the matter, that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. This falsehood has been repeated on literally hundreds of occasions, and George W. Bush routinely uses it in his speeches.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number three:

• On the day Mr. Gore announced his candidacy in Carthage, Tenn., his family's hometown, Jim Nicholson, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had a more elaborate stunt. He rode in a wagon pulled by mules to the hotel on Embassy Row in Washington where Mr. Gore lived for much of his youth.

  "He has tried to pass himself off as this hardscrabble, homespun central Tennessee farm boy and that is not what he is", said Mr. Nicholson, playing off the fact that Mr. Gore had told The Des Moines Register that he had learned to slop hogs and clear land on the family farm. Friends later told reporters that Mr. Gore's father had kept him on a backbreaking work schedule during summers on the family farm.

  The problem, again, is that Gore's claim was true. He did work on his family farm as a child. This time, Mitchell admits that the Republicans were making it up. But she still shades the story by making it sound as though the truth hadn't come out until later, and as though the contrary view rests solely on the word of Gore's friends. In fact the childhood farm chores had been extensively reported for a decade. The false claim that Gore had lied about the chores was repeated on many occasions in the press.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number four:

• The Republicans got help as well from an unexpected source. When the Democratic primary fight became bitter, former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey insisted that Mr. Gore had deliberately distorted his policy positions in what he called a "pattern of misrepresentation". At one point, Mr. Bradley spat out, "Why should we believe that you will tell the truth as president if you don't tell the truth as a candidate?"

  The problem is that Bradley is endlessly quoted to this effect without any attempt to determine whether he is right. In fact Bradley often wrongly accused Gore of distorting his positions.

And that's it. That, according to the New York Times, is the story of the Republicans' campaign to paint Al Gore as an embellisher. The New York Times cites four accusations, all of them false, and in every case the New York Times either repeats the false accusations as truth or else provides misleading accounts of them.

The New York Times' article is not an aberration. The list of false attacks on Al Gore's character that have been circulated in the media for the last two years is extraordinary. In some cases, as in the ones (mis)cited by the New York Times, Gore is accused of lying when he was actually telling the truth:

• Several publications have called Gore a liar in very harsh terms because he claimed that his father was a pioneer in the civil rights movement. It is true that his father lost his nerve on the Civil Rights Act, but that does not change the overwhelming and (until recently) universally accepted evidence of his leadership on civil rights. Gore's assertion is perfectly accurate.
• 
  --Story Link--
• In probably the single most vicious attack of the entire campaign, several publications have suggested that Gore lied when claiming to have been present at his sister's death. The only evidence they offer is that he also made a political speech the same day, and Gore's driver has explained his schedule for that day in detail.
• 
  --Story Link--

In other cases, Gore's words are twisted, misquoted, or simply made up to make him sound as though he were making a claim that he was not making. For example, some publications have even claimed, falsely, that Gore literally uttered the words "inventing the Internet".
--Story Link--

There are many others:

• In the closing moments of Gore's second debate with George W. Bush, Jim Lehrer falsely accused Gore of having called Bush a "bumbler" in one of his campaign commercials.
• 
  --Story Link--

  Was this simply a mistake on Lehrer's part? Okay, but Lehrer made his "mistake" in the context of rebuking Gore for his own miniscule mistakes in the first debate.

• Gore told a a union audience that his mother had sung the "union label" song to him as a child. Gore's comment was obviously a joke and the audience took it as a joke. Yet, incredibly, numerous supposed journalists have asserted that he meant it seriously, or else tried (on no evidence) to cast doubt on Gore's obviously-true claim that it was a joke.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When Gore spoke of his proposal to put Social Security and Medicare in a "lockbox", some "journalists" accused him of dissembling on the astonishing grounds that he was not actually proposing to put the money into a physical box.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When the Washington Post finally gave up on the "Love Story" story, pretending that it had only recently been disproven, they moved to another falsehood. Gore had claimed that his sister was the first volunteer for the Peace Corps. This claim was accurate, inasmuch as his sister had in fact worked for the Corps without pay from its earliest days, only later joining its paid staff. But the Post called Gore's claim a "lie", on the grounds that she had not worked as a volunteer *overseas*, which Gore had never claimed; they did not mention that she worked without pay.
• 
  --Story Link--
• Gore told some students in New Hampshire the story of a Tennessee community activist who brought his attention to a toxic dump, whereupon he looked for other examples, found Love Canal, and held the first hearings on the issue. "Journalists" first misquoted him as having claimed to to have started the issue, when in fact he was giving credit to the activists. Even when the misquotation was grudgingly corrected, they continued to distort his words, as if he were claiming to have discovered the toxic pollution at Love Canal.

In yet other cases, Gore made a trivial error that has been exaggerated by his critics, and the exaggeration has been falsely attributed to him. Such is the case with the school in Florida that Gore cited in the first of his debates with George W. Bush.
--Story Link--

These are just a few examples among many. People make mistakes all the time. Al Gore is one of them, and it's surprising that an army of opposition researchers hasn't come up with more substantive errors after fact-checking a whole life of public statements. So is George W. Bush, whose errors during the two debates so far have been dramatically worse than those of Gore. To start with, Bush falsely implied that the Europeans have no troops in Kosovo, when in fact they have tens of thousands, and that the United States has significant numbers of troops in Haiti, when it does not. And he made numerous false statements:

• that Gore was outspending him, when the opposite was true;
• that the rate of uninsured people was falling in Texas and rising nationally, when the opposite was true;
• that the men who killed James Byrd would be put to death, when only two had been sentenced to death and their appeals had not been exhausted;
• that middle-income seniors would get drug coverage immediately under his Medicare plan;
• that Gore had lied about this;
• that the new spending in his budget plan is equal to the tax cuts;
• that "most of the tax reductions [in his plan] go to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder";
• that the president is unable to influence the actions of the Food and Drug Administration;
• that Hillary Clinton's 1993 national health insurance initiative would have entailed nationalizing health care; and
• that Gore had claimed to be the author of the Earned Income Tax Credit law.

That is just a partial list of Bush's "mistakes" in two ninety-minute debates, and it doesn't include the dubious numbers he quoted from Republicans in the Senate or the mess he made of education, taxes, Social Security, and the Middle East. Nor does it include the "mistakes" that littered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, or the especially egregious "mistakes" of his brutal campaign against John McCain in South Carolina, and so on.
--Story Link--

With only a few exceptions (like the one just cited), the press has gone to great lengths to cover up or minimize Bush's false statements. Press coverage of the first debate focused overwhelmingly on Gore's two comparatively trivial errors and on endless suggestions that Gore was rude for having sighed several times.
--Story Link--

Of course, the sighs were often exaggerated by turning the volume up. (Falsely calling someone a liar, as Bush did several times, is not rude?) Pundits bizarrely praised Bush for his command of the issues after the first debate despite his lengthy catalog of errors:
--Catalog Link--

And the 10/5/00 Washington Post buried the Democrats' list of Bush errors at the end of a long story about Bush's accusations against Gore.

The problem is systemic. A reporter for a British newspaper, the Observer, was struck at the completely different approaches of the reporters covering Gore and Bush, and reported a disturbing incident in which a Washington Post reporter well-known for her open hostility to Gore held a toy gun to his head.
--Story Link--

Indeed, press coverage of Gore has been spun in a strongly negative fashion for a long time.
--Story Link--
--Story Link--
--Story Link--

The press, following the lead of Republican "investigators", has repeatedly falsified and spun the famous Buddhist temple event, among others.
--Story Link--

They have also falsified and exaggerated Gore's performance in earlier debates, thereby creating a caricuture of him as a vicious attacker.
--Story Link--

Yes, the press has suggested that Bush is not mentally competent to run the country. But it has not fabricated huge amounts of evidence to support this charge, and it has not routinely used vocabulary that is remotely as harsh as that used against Gore. You have rarely seen the media call Bush a "moron" or "idiot", but Gore has routinely been called much worse. Here is a very partial list:

• "evil"
• "imperious&qu ot;, "repellent"
• "lethal", "ruthless", "liar"
• "ruthless", "relentless", "bully", "maniacal"
• "manipulative", "dishonest"

(I am citing the Daily Howler for most of these examples so that you can read some analysis of them. But the Howler provides precise citations for the originals, which should be easy to look up.)

Indeed, Bush's alleged mental incompetence is often tacitly used to excuse his falsehoods -- he doesn't know what he's talking about, so he can't be lying. Or Gore is accused of a "pattern" of false and exaggerated statements, but then Bush escapes the same accusation for the simple reason that nobody bothers to gather Bush's false and exaggerated statements in one place.

This is just the press. We're not even talking about the conservatives on the Internet that have been circulating long lists of Gore's supposed lies and exaggerations -- most of which are, of course, themselves lies or exaggerations, including garbled and embellished versions of the already false versions in the press. Some of these lists are credited to the RNC, but of course it is hard to know for sure.

The new science of character assassination, then, has several components:

• It starts with a strategy: a conscious choice by a political party that it is going to position its opponent in a certain way. The 10/15/00 Washington Post quotes a Republican consultant as saying that "PR 101 is define your opponent before he tries to define himself", and the whole campaign is clearly organized by the principles of PR.
• It requires a clearinghouse to distribute "facts" that fit the strategy. In this case the burden has been carried by the Republican National Committee and by the office of House majority leader Dick Armey, which got its start by circulating the original fraudulent charges from Wired News about Gore's Internet statement.
• It requires rank-and-file supporters who are willing to pass along any junk that fits the party line.
• But above all, it requires a press corps that has decided to go along with it. Part of the problem is that the press operates in packs -- an echo chamber of lazy pundits in which every "fact" that fits a prevailing stereotype gets endlessly repeated.

But it's not just that. It is not surprising that Rupert Murdoch's media properties, such as Fox and the New York Post, publish smears against people who disagree with Murdoch's far-right views. But it can hardly be an accident that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press have all assigned reporters to the Gore campaign who write, day in and day out, the same sorts of exaggerated smears. To be sure, the press is not unanimous in spreading Republican lies as truth; the contrast between the NYT/Post/AP axis and the calm reporting of the Los Angeles Times could hardly be greater. But the Post, Times, and AP, all well-connected and widely syndicated, set the tone for the press as a whole. The fix is clearly in, and these establishment media operations are clearly down with it. They see which way the wind is blowing, and they don't want to get left behind.

A kind of coup is in effect, continuing the pattern of the Whitewater hoax and impeachment. If the far right succeeds in its campaign, then the incoming government will be staffed by people who are trained in the new science of character assassination. It's all they know. And having destroyed Al Gore, they will come after the rest of us.

Copyright (c) 2000 by Philip E. Agre.
All rights reserved.

So do I. You ain't gettin my personal info, you dirty site! Opress the man.. read the article with no registration!


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CitizenC

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This is mentioned every time a NYT article comes up, but there *IS* a no-registration-required site. Instead of www.nytimes... use partners.nytimes...

HERE'S THE ARTICLE without registration crap.

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/17/technology/17ONL I.html More in depth..

What's truly amazing is that there's been so much focus on Gore's exagerations (a politician exagerating- what a story!) and virtualy none on Bush's straight out lies about his own budget. Lies spanning _billions_ of dollars of spending differences between what he says and what his own budget says. Misrepresentations about what Social Security even is (and complete neglect of the fact that there's a huge a DEBT owed to current retirees that has to be paid somehow) Anyne who's been following Paul Krugman's opinion collumn in the New York Times should know this, but apparently most people don't read that anymore. Krugman stuff - needs a free registration to read if you haven't already.

The silly part of this political argument, particularly from a republican gun wielding person from Texas, is that such a person would contend that the best way to raise a child is to give them a shot gun as early as possible and let them kill as many animals as they like. Now I understand that when you kill an animal it real, and such a person believes that the reality will teach the sanctity of life, while the animate violence trivializes the value of life. I do not think it is necessary to reject the possible benefits of teaching a child to kill animals, or allowing the state to kill people that the state says are guilty of a crime. I do think it is ridiculous for Bush and Cheney to blame all of societies ills on violent video games and the Internet when parent and state sponsored violence is happening practically on thier front stoop.

Intel, the world's largest semiconductor maker, said that its current generation of mobile Pentium processors already consumed less power on average than Transmeta's, and that a set of technologies on the horizon for 2002 or 2003 would keep Intel comfortably in the lead.

More info at NY Times (free registration required)on both the physics and the chemistry awards.

Its seems like kind of a down year for the Nobels. The physics award is for work that is closer to engineering than to pure research (not that there's anything wrong with that ;0) and similarly the chemistry award seems more like material science.

More info at NY Times (free registration required)on both the physics and the chemistry awards.

Its seems like kind of a down year for the Nobels. The physics award is for work that is closer to engineering than to pure research (not that there's anything wrong with that ;0) and similarly the chemistry award seems more like material science.