james ostrowski, internet expert
more dreck from the LRC blog:
The debate
Posted by
James Ostrowski at 11:06 AMI didn’t score this one but Ron Paul did very well on all questions and was particularly strong on the war and foreign policy. Tough and terse. If they gave him a chance on the IRS question, I must have been making my eggs because I missed it.
He is again winning the post-debate polls. Drudge and ABC. The way it works is when you go back to check the results, there is no option for voting again because they know you already voted, so the spamming charge is a canard.
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you RP crooners should keep your mouths shut when it’s obvious you don’t know shit about shit (the rapidly declining career whore ostrowski has enough trouble keeping his obeyer snout out from under black robes).
far as that criterion goes, i can vote in the drudge poll all day long. just voted 4 times in a brief test. simply delete the drudge cookies, and the vote button comes back. this is dweeb 101 material — something the average internet fan figured out back in the late 90s. but ostrowski, writing for LRC, needn’t perform even the slightest fact check or theory verification. he’s supporting ron paul! it’s all kosher!
vote button appearance aside, drudge may not be checking for IP address downstream. assume he were though. i can change my IP address at least once a day, and i barely know squat about the internet. when i was on dial-up i could sometimes change it a few times per hour. i know of no reason theoretically that a talented and knowledgeable ron paul spammer couldn’t work it out so that he secretly controls thousands of PCs owned by others, having those computers participate in whatever polls he wants. the cookies and IP addresses wouldn’t pass muster under that scheme? without further research and hard verification, you won’t see me or any other sensible person decreeing that “the spamming charge is a canard”. though most of the RP spam talk is as worthless as ostrowski’s post, the drudge poll indicates strongly that spamming’s a possibility, not the opposite.
as usual with the LRC-type “liberty” crowd, there are two standards of scrutiny — one you apply to your opponents, and one you apply to friends. that is wrong, dishonorable behavior that will only serve to diminish liberty.
UPDATE: can’t be spammed? explain the brownback/paul disparity between the drudge poll and the ABC poll. just ran a variance column in excel (figures reflect excel rounding). even with two flavors of “nobody” options in the ABC poll, the variances between polls are under 5 percentage points for each candidate (averaging 1.7), except for brownback and paul. brownback is 30.2% at drudge, and only 2.9% at ABC (27.2 diff), while paul’s 36.6% at drudge and 55.8% at ABC (-19.2 diff).
spamming “canard”, my ass. and, obviously, these polls are ludicrously tainted even before the tech bit. strange what bias does to people, running around like headless chickens touting such baloney. that phone polls suck does not make online polls more valid.