Haven't read the Nocera article but did notice in UPI's Almanac This Day in History that today was the anniversary of the Senate's rejection of Bork.  I briefly wondered how something like that ends up on the list.  Was it the first time a nominee was rejected?  No.  I looked. I thought what an interesting way to keep a controversy going. 

Bork should have been accepted.  That he wasn't was less about his judiciary views and everything to do with his associations, particulary Nixon.    Watergate and Nixon's resignation was really when the partisan divide deepened.  I have often thought that the Republican Nixon faction are driven by it and will not stop the rancor until they have taken down a Democratic president.  It is the Orthogonian Nixonian thing to do, i.e., don't get mad, get even.

So many on the left and in the media are so proud of themselves for taking down President Nixon.  For the rest of us, it was a very ugly thing.  Something we have yet to recover from.  Maybe we never will.   And certainly not if we get an annual reminder of divisive events.

 

What I have noticed over the last 40 years of voting was the rise of southern influence in controling political discourse. I think you have to go all the way back to civil rights and the defeat of apartheid in the deep south. They were willing to embrace an idiology that could be used to hit back at government. To them government was the problem. It started as a backlash against feminism, civil rights and drug use. Regan only harnessed it to get elected and corporations took advantage of it. All the clashes over issues just seemed to build more animosity as we moved through elections. Throw in religious dominionism and we have a political party that thinks they are the only ones who has the right to govern. They will use what ever they can to achieve their goal in taking government apart. My personal opinion is the whole movement has begun to unravel.

From Steve Freeman, in response to tmac above:

I’ve answered this peer review question and most other common, sneering questions in a Frequently Asked Questions page. Perhaps someday I give a much more thorough explanation, but this will have to do for now.

Who is this sneering regular? Nothing she says has any remote relevance to the facts of my work. The first seven of my book’s eight chapters, as well as the prologue, offer virtually no opinion or commentary whatsoever. The chapters unearth, relate and analyze the facts of the ’04 election, the exit polls and other polling, election and demographic data and of US election protocols in general. NEP made public more than enough data – a mistake they’ve since resolved to avoid repeating – to conclusively disprove their ad hoc assumption that Kerry voters participated in higher proportion than Bush voters. The data also provide extensive circumstantial evidence of fraud. One of many examples: the disparity was zero in precincts where the vote was counted manually compared with an average of seven percentage points nationwide. The book contains many other equally damning findings – facts, not opinions.

Moreover, all these analyses are triangulated with other polling, election and demographic data. And, where investigated, have been supported by hard evidence of altered ballots, etc…

I’m not tenured. This research has taken me off any tenure track. Alas, I must each day earn my daily grub, not one cent of which is related to this work. Every cent of institutional support for US elections is to justify and legitimize the extant charade, in part by attacking any critics. This institutional support structure is the basic reason why it would be unimaginable that work such as mine would be published in a traditional peer review Political Science journal. This institutional support structure also is behind many if not most of the sneering voices on these sites and listservs.

For the record, I don't happen to suspect that there is institutional support behind your comments, tmac, based on what I have observed to date.  As a comment on style, you seem to enjoy throwing sharp elbows from time to time and this strikes me as just another example of such.  I don't take Occam's Razor as always the best guide to the small "t" truth but I go with it in this case.  

This hardly demonstrates that Steve is right but it's often been the case that those arguing minority, and threatening, views who have apparently turned out to be correct were initially scorned and sneered at, and worse.  As, surely, you know.  You don't strike me as one who can only have her history wrapped up nice and neat in a box.  But maybe I'm wrong about that. 

As I wrote, I had hoped that Steve had both inclination and time to come here and directly engage you or others on these issues. 

 I have been doing election analysis since 2004 .  I was the first analysts to use Monte Carlo Simulation to calculate the probability of winning the Electoral vote using the latest state polls. I have also developed the True vote Model which is an post-election  forensic tool. The models are available on the web for anyone to use.

I wrote  Proving Election Fraud: Phantom Voters, Uncounted Votes and the National Exit Poll

My website is http://richardcharnin.com/ .

It links to my blog,  my book, all of my analytical posts and those of others - including Steve Freedman.  His book is a wonderful read. I am a member of his Election Integrity Group. Steve is very familiar with my work.

I suggest that readers google 'richard charnin' and 'True Vote Model".

Let me stress these facts:

1- In the 1988-2008 presidential elections, the Democrats wonthe unadjusted exit polls by 52-42%, but the margin was reduced by election fraud to 48-46%.

2- In the six elections there were 300 state exit polls, of which 137 exceeded the margin of error which included a 30% cluster effect.

Probability: ABSOLUTE ZERO.

3- Of the 137 exit polls, 132 red-shifted to the Republican in the vote.

Probability: ZERO.

 

This is from my website:

 

Election forecasters, academics, political scientists and main stream media pundits never discuss or analyze the statistical evidence that proves election fraud is systemic - beyond a reasonable doubt. This site contains a compilation of presidential, congressional and senate election analyses based on pre-election polls,unadjusted exit polls  and associated True Vote Models.  Those who never discuss or analyze Election Fraud should focus on the factual statistical data and run the models. If anyone wants to refute the analytical evidence, they are encouraged to do so in a response. Election forecasters, academics and political scientists are welcome to peer review the content.

The bedrock of the evidence derives from this undisputed fact: Final national and state exit polls are always forced to match the recorded vote – even if doing so requires an impossible turnout of prior election voters and implausible vote shares. All demographic categories are adjusted to conform to the recorded vote. To use these forced final exit polls as the basis for election research is unscientific and irresponsible. The research is based on the bogus premise that the recorded vote is sacrosanct and represents how people actually voted.

Nothing can be further from the truth.

It is often stated that exit polls were very accurate in elections prior to 2004, but have deviated sharply from the vote since. The statement is a misconception; it is based on a comparison of FINAL exit polls in elections prior to 2004 and PRELIMINARY exit polls since. It's apples and oranges. But FINAL exit polls published in the media have always been FORCED to match the RECORDED vote. That's why they APPEAR to have been accurate.

The RECORDED vote has deviated sharply from the TRUE VOTE in EVERY election since 1968. Yes, it is true: UNADJUSTED exit polls have ALWAYS been accurate. They closely matched the True Vote in 2000, 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2010. FINAL exit polls have exactly matched the fraudulent RECORDED vote because they have been forced to do so.

It is a documented fact that millions of votes are uncounted in every election. The Census Bureau indicates that since 1968, approximately 80 million more votes were cast than recorded. And these are just the uncounted votes. What about the votes switched on unverifiable voting machines and central tabulators? But vote miscounts are only part of the story. The True Vote analysis does not include the millions of potential voters who were illegally disenfranchised and never got to vote.

My book, Proving Election Fraud: Phantom Voters, Uncounted Votes, and the National Exit Poll, is a detailed analysis which proves that the recorded vote is always different from the True Vote. Unlike the misinformation spread in the media, voting machine “glitches” are not due to machine failures. It’s the fault of the humans who program them.

In the 1968-2008 Presidential elections, the Republicans won the recorded vote by a 49-45% margin. The Recursive National True Vote Model  indicates that the Democrats actually won by 49-45%.

In the 1988-2008 elections, the Democrats won the average of the unadjusted state exit polls 51.8-41.6%. But they won the recorded vote by just 48-46%. That’s an 8% margin discrepancy. The state exit poll margin of error was exceeded in 137 of 300 elections. The probability of that occurrence is ZERO. Of the 137 that exceeded theMoE,  132 red-shifted to the Republican. The probability is ZERO. The proof is in the 1988-2008 Unadjusted State Exit Polls Statistical Reference.