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My paranoid mind wonders sometimes: With the fact that SCOTUS allows for foreign "investment" in politicians in the US, who is to keep someone from making a company out of a tax haven country, then via a PAC, hand over large campaign contributions in order for a candidate to do his/her best to damage/destroy government and US interests?

Nobody knows for sure, but the teabaggers seem to be acting for some other country's interest, and not the US.

Well, if you're really into that, consider that the last people to get large amounts of small, untraceable donations were Obama (in 2008 and 2012) and Howard Dean (2004, Democrat primaries). On the Republican side, Romney appears to have received some interesting primary support from vote tabulation machines.

Considering how fucked you would've been with Romney, Obama is still the lesser evil.

While it was great for Obama that he was able to sell this argument during the election, I happen to disagree. There were many things wrong with Romney, for me the most prominent one being whether he actually should have won the Republican nomination in the first place (link is to some shenanigans that look to me like considerable vote fraud hidden in the counting of votes), but he still looked the lesser evil. I figured at least a considerable part of Romney's political efforts would go to just reversing the harm that Obama did with health care, the US economy, and foreign policy, and we'd probably get an economic boost out of Romney due to reduced regulatory uncertainty for businesses.

In that light, there are a large number of odd voting peculiarities that favored Romney in the Republican primaries over every other candidate (large precincts by vote heavily favored Romney usually at the expense of one single other candidate which was usual Ron Paul, but could also be Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich). That effect persisted even when attempts were made to control for degree of urbanization. I think it's some sort of fraud myself.

The paper I linked to calculates that Romney received roughly 1.2 million votes by this peculiarity. That's more than a 10% boost to his number of votes (10.0 million). Plus, he wouldn't have performed as well in the early primaries and caucuses (for example, IMHO placing a distant third in the Iowa caucus behind Rick Santorum and Ron Paul rather than a close second place behind Santorum) and tying with Ron Paul in New Hampshire. That sort of weak start might have even damned his campaign.

Look what happened to OWS - it fizzled out instead of escalating.

I think it's instructive to look at the differences between how the Tea Party and OWS fared. Tea Party is still going and changing campaign planks throughout the US. It wasn't strong enough to knock out Romney, but it forced the hand of whoever manipulates vote tabulation in Republican primaries.

In comparison, what electoral results has OWS accomplished? They were big protests. They got in the news and inconvenienced a lot of people. There's even some sort of mildly coherent narrative about what OWS is about. But they haven't tried much less succeeded at changing how people vote.

Think of it this way (car analogy time!): a crisis is like a car crash. It's bad, but people could see the car from a mile away and avoid it if they had a bit of sense. Instability would be if the car's invisible, and nobody knows when a car might or might not crash (and where it would crash, so you don't know which way to dodge)

The driver is getting paid a lot of money to crash someone else's car. Plus he's got an air bag and seat belt. All the excitement happens to the people he hits. So it's just not his problem. And a lot of people just don't have that sense to get out of the way.

But "recalibration" can also be an excuse to reprogram the vote-flipping algorithms from "Romney" to "Romney/Ryan"...

For those who don't keep up with hilarious news of how rethuglicans are eating their own, he's talking about this story.

More (Part 1)
(Part 2)
There's supposed to be a Part 3 forthcoming...

But "recalibration" can also be an excuse to reprogram the vote-flipping algorithms from "Romney" to "Romney/Ryan"...

For those who don't keep up with hilarious news of how rethuglicans are eating their own, he's talking about this story.

More (Part 1)
(Part 2)
There's supposed to be a Part 3 forthcoming...

Ok, hang on a sec.

Regarding the straw man, the study itself states: "At this point of our analysis, the cause appears to originate with electronic voting equipment; the problem does not exist when manual methods are used." But the Iowa example shown two pages later flatly contradicts this. See p.5 and p.7: Linked Study

Regarding Iowa: "GOP officials discovered inaccuracies in 131 precincts"... Perhaps, but the scope of these inaccuracies were magnitudes different than the purported "vote-flipping" implied by the study. Romney lost less than 50 votes on the statewide recount (relative to Santorum), compared with the study's implied 7850-vote gap. Data from the missing eight precincts couldn't come remotely close to closing this gap. So even correcting for the found inaccuracies, we're left with over 99% of the purported discrepancy unaccounted for. Were the fraudsters simply 99% successful at covering their tracks? If so, wouldn't there be many fewer precincts with discrepancies? The ~50 vote recount correction could easily be due to random human error.

Regarding cherry-picking: there is no question that there is a bulletproof correlation between precinct size and vote ratios, in Iowa in this primary. (The null hypothesis has been proven false, in other words.) The real question is whether that correlation ITSELF correlates strongly with the type of balloting/counting used, and for this there are very few data points shown. Are there counterexamples (places where electronic voting was used but the anomaly is not seen, or vice versa)? How many? What distinguishes the ballot-counting process in the Iowa Caucuses from, say, FL Palm Beach County (where there was no anomaly observed)? What were the correlations, if any, in all these different states and counties, of precinct size vs a priori voter registration (Republican / Democrat ratio)?

Can anything be gleaned from this? Again, it would be nice to see the study peer-reviewed, and to have stronger logic why the correlations COULDN'T be a result of "natural causes", rather than just we can't think of a way. (I agree that there is no other immediately obvious explanation, but that doesn't mean one doesn't exist.)

Actually, this was the paper I was looking for:

http://www.themoneyparty.org/main/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Republican-Primary-Election-Results-Amazing-Statistical-Anomalies_V2.0.pdf

Same authors and analysis. But much more in depth treatment of the data and analysis of alternate explanations.

I am definitely not the conspiracy expert type of person, but it seems like the authors did a pretty thorough analysis of possible voting machine tampering during the primary here:

http://www.themoneyparty.org/main/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2008_2012_ElectionsResultsAnomaliesAndAnalysis_V1.51.pdf

I don't know enough stats to really delve into possible biases, and also who knows if they are starting from the right data. But I'd be curious about what others thought of this. If it is true, it is scary.

The ony possible flaw I saw from looking at the results is the anomalous results always came at the expense of Santorum, so perhaps there was some correlation between precinct size and vote patterns specifically for Santorum's policies that the authors couldn't tease out of the data.

The numbers don't really matter. The fact is that the US military (and CIA, etc.) has become much more efficient at killing and controlling foreign countries. We took out the leader of Libya and didn't send in any military troops (just a bunch of "advisers"). Egypt was even easier.

That doesn't make the violent interventionism reduced - in fact if anything it has expanded. It's just done more cheaply.

And all this is just following the original plan (it's just behind schedule).