Posts Tagged ‘CNN
GOP Debate Watch Thread: CNN Las Vegas
H/T CNN.com
CNN Western Republican Presidential Debate
Watch on CNN (check local listings for channel)
Live streaming: http://live.cnn.com/
Twitter: #CNNDebate
8 p.m. ET Tuesday, October 18
Yes, we have a mole in the production staff at CNN, and they’ve managed to uncover a few of the questions:
Michelle Bachmann, a question for you. You’ve attempted to appeal to “values voters” by touting your Christian faith. As president, how long after your inauguration would you wait before outlawing all other religions? Would you actually execute the non-Christians, or would you allow them to convert?
Newt Gingrich–in the past several debates, your encyclopedic knowledge of U.S. history, your refusal to “roll over” in the face of “ridiculous” questions from debate moderators, and obvious intelligence have made our handpicked candidate, Mitt Romney, look bad. Therefore, we will not be asking you any questions this evening.
Ron Paul, your Plan to Restore America would cut a trillion dollars in so-called “wasteful, unconstitutional” spending from the Federal budget in 2013 and would balance the budget in three years. Do you plan to kill helpless senior citizens with your bare hands, or will you be outsourcing this heartless mass murder to the death cult known as the Tea Party?
Herman Cain, as the token House Slave bought and paid for by your massahs in the Republican party, you are clearly a token and an Uncle Tom. Would you mind cleaning up the stage after the debate? Remember to sweep under all the podiums.
Frontrunner Mitt Romney, you receive roughly 25 times more free media coverage from outlets like CNN than all other GOP candidates combined, yet you’ve never managed to score above 30% in the polls or win a significant straw poll. You’re so disliked by grassroots GOP voters that even Saturday Night live has made you the butt of jokes. Frontrunner Mitt Romney, what are we doing wrong? Do we need to add you to our staff? What if we just renamed CNN the Romney News Network until we’ve engineered your nomination? Are there any “November Surprises” we can spring on your opponents? GOP Frontrunner Mitt Romney, are you comfortable? Can I get you a beverage or snack? Did you get the flowers we sent?
CNN claims that "radical right" is a bigger threat to US security than radical Islam.
Mark Potok...of the very anti-American Southern Poverty Law Center
Just when I thought there couldn’t be anyone more disgusting than Michael Moore…along comes Mark Potok.
(from MRC)
Mark Potok of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center claimed on Monday’s Newsroom on CNN that radical Islam wasn’t “our biggest domestic terror threat,” that instead, “that pretty clearly comes from the radical right in this country.” Anchor Suzanne Malveaux touted Potok as “expert on extremism” from “one of the most highly regarded non-governmental operations that are monitoring hate groups.”
Malveaux brought on the SPLC spokesman at the bottom of the 12 noon Eastern hour to discuss the upcoming hearings by the House Homeland Security Committee on the radicalization of American Muslims. The anchor first asked him, “From your study of tracking radical groups, potentially hate groups, what do you think of this hearing? Is al Qaeda radicalizing Muslims? Is that our biggest homegrown terrorism threat right now?”
Potok replied with his “radical right” claim, and went on to criticize the chairman of the House committee, Rep. Peter King:
POTOK: Well, I think it’s not our biggest domestic terror threat. I think that pretty clearly comes from the radical right in this country, although I would certainly not minimize the threat of jihadist terrorism in this country. Obviously, we have seen a fair amount of it. But what is completely false is, first of all, the idea that Peter King has repeatedly said, that most Muslims are good Americans and so on. You know, in fact what he has said is that 85 percent or 90 percent of the imams running mosques in this country are radical. They’re jihadists, and everything suggests that what he says is false. He has also suggested that Muslims are not cooperating with law enforcement, and, you know, we work very closely at the Southern Poverty Law Center with law enforcement officials, and that is absolutely not what they’re saying. They’re saying they’re getting a great deal of cooperation, and in fact, something close to half of the jihadist terror attempts that is have occurred in this country since 9/11 were found out, in fact, because of Muslim informants.
For the rest of the segment, the “expert” hammered on his “radical right” talking point, stating that “both on the radical right, hate groups and so on, and on the jihadist front in this country, the vast majority of people seem to be operating entirely on their own, so-called lone wolves.” Potok went on to specify which of these groups or movements concerned him the most:
MALVEAUX: You said in the beginning that it was not the idea of radicalizing Muslims, that that really was not any kind of significant threat when it comes to homegrown terrorism that- are there other groups to be concerned about that take center stage?
POTOK: Sure. Let me say I do think it’s a significant threat. I don’t mean to minimize it, but there are even larger threats out there. An example, to respond to your question, is within the so-called anti-government patriot movement, what we used to think of as the militia movement back in the 1990s. There is a whole and rapidly-growing kind of sub movement called the ‘sovereign citizens’ movement.’ These are people who believe the government has no right to control them in any way, to pass laws that affect them, to require them to pay taxes, even to require things like driver’s licenses and auto registrations. Well, you know, on May 20 of last year, a father and son team of these ‘sovereign citizens,’ in fact, murdered two officers, police officers, in West Memphis, Arkansas, and badly wounded two others before being killed themselves. You know, this was at an ordinary traffic stop-
MALVEAUX: Right.
POTOK: Set off out just of the blue sky. So, you know, and we’re hearing from all over the country from law enforcement officials who are very worried about the sovereign citizens’ phenomenon. It’s extremely dangerous.
So….if I am reading him correctly…he’s calling the Tea Party a militia movement? It’s people like this idiot that are the true danger to this country. Mark Potok and Michael Moore…two peas in a pod.
It’s obvious why CNN has lost all credibility with the country as a news source.
We may as well be watching Jerry Springer.
Here's that little HillBuzz bit on CNN
h/t TheRealMSU for catching this for YouTube.
This is too funny.
The reporter and I talked for ten minutes on the phone this morning…mostly about Democrats committing voter fraud in actual elections.
And they only used two sentences from me, but at least they got me calling the media out for being so nasty to Bristol.These were my two quotes, out of ten minutes, that got on the air:
“It’s not scamming a game show…what it is, it’s a way for people to show their fervent support for her.”
“I think is actually cool to do to the contest because the media has been so horrible to this young woman.”
The Team Bristol cookies from GetCookiesByKatie got some screen time, too, along with some of the comments made in threads about how much fun it is to vote hundreds if not thousands of times for Bristol every Monday. Which IS fun.
Can’t wait to do it one last time on MONDAY!
Have you started planning a Monday night Dancing with the Stars watch party yet?
CNN Fudging the Numbers? Or Just Coincidence?
Hi Folks, apologies for my relative infrequency of posts. Life/work has been so busy these last several weeks, but K. asked me to look in to something and post my analysis here.
A few waves were made recently when a CNN/Time poll found that Miller only had a 2-point lead over write-in candidate Murkowski in Alaska.
Considering Murkowski is running a write-in campaign it would seem highly improbable that she could be polling so well. A closer look at the numbers may explain why.
I am not an expert on polls, nor am I a statistical analyst. In fact, I mostly slept or skipped my way to a near-four-point in the only college statistics course I took. However, I don’t think you have to be either a pollster or a statistician to notice the obvious.
The one absolutely glaring issue with this poll is that the breakout by age shows “N/A” for the 18-34 age group.
CNN may soon be reporting that people under 35 are no longer eligible to vote
If you examine the trends among the age groups it is clear that Miller does better the younger the voter while Murkowski does better the older the voter. Somewhere north of 20% of the population of Alaska falls into the missing age group, so their absence is clearly no small issue
Along that same path, it appears there is a possible problem with the age distribution of the sample. Unfortunately the data doesn’t seem to include actual counts of the respondents by age. But we are in luck because “margin of error” is a standard statistical process, and the poll does include margin of error for the age breakdown of voter preferences.
I won’t go into the statistical mumbo-jumbo here, but if you’re curious you can check out Wikipedia’s article on margin of error. All I will say is that you have to almost double your sample size for each additional 1% of sampling error you want to eliminate. Thus, a 5% margin of error means a sample size of about 384, while a 4% margin of error means a sample size of about 600.
Note the margin of error for the 50-64 age group: 5%. Now note the margin of error for the 35-49 age group: 6.5%. Using this information we can make an educated guess that this particular poll includes at least 50% (and possibly upwards of 67%) more participants in the 50-64 age group than it does the 35-49 age group. Yet according to data from the last census, 22-26% of the population of Alaska falls into the 35-49 age group, versus only 14-20% of the population falling into the 50-64 age group.
In other words, the poll seems to have way oversampled the 50-64 age group versus the 35-49 age group. Coincidentally, Murkowski does far better vs. Miller among 50-64 year-olds (+2) than she does among 35-49 year-olds (-6).
Another observation is the relative distribution of the sample among the three major boroughs of Anchorage, Mat-Su Area, and Fairbanks. Again, using the margins of error as a guide, we can deduce that Anchorage – where Murkowski fares best – likely accounts for 50-55% of the sample. Yet Anchorage only accounts for about 42% of the state’s population, so again it appears that the poll is giving improper weight to the more pro-Murkowski demographic.
We cannot infer from this data how the poll would look if the rest of Alaska were proportionally represented in this poll, but if the other two boroughs that were polled are any indication, it would seem that Miller is averaging about a 16 points lead outside of Anchorage.
So what do we conclude from this? Even considering the “likely voter” bias (which is not explained in the publication), it seems highly unlikely that the relative age distribution in this poll is representative of actual voters come election day. Add to that the glaring omission of the 18-34 year-old voter group – which almost certainly breaks for Miller by 6+ points – and the possible bias towards Anchorage residents, it would seem that this poll is not nearly an accurate representation of how anyone is actually faring in Alaska (except maybe for McAdams, who seems to be all but forgotten).
But does that mean CNN is fudging the numbers? Or is it pure coincidence? I can’t say. I doubt that CNN’s pollsters would fudge the numbers after the fact, but it is possible that the polling strategy intentionally set out to achieve a sample that was inherently more likely to be pro-Murkowski.
Or, maybe there is a perfectly good explanation for the missing age group, and maybe it was pure randomness that the age distributions don’t match the actual demographics. Who knows. Like I said, I’m not a pollster or statistician. Just a guy who looked at the data and saw some problems. You’ll have to make the call yourselves.
***** UPDATE *****
An astute reader pointed out that the percentages for “Under 50″ segmentation do not match the percentages for the 35-49 age group. If 18-34 year-olds were not included at all, we could expect these two segments to match, since the only folks under 50 would all be included in the 35-49 age group.
Clearly, that is not the case.
If you look at the 50 and Older segmentation and compare it to the two age groups of 50-64 and 65+, the percentages seem to average out. Once you consider the larger sample size for the 50-64 age group relative to the 65+ group, 39% (Murkowski) is a plausible average between 37% and 43%, and 24% (McAdams) is a plausible average between 25% and 21%.
Note that Miller’s lead among the Under 50 group is actually LARGER than his lead among the 35-49 group. This basically confirms that the 18-34 group must be breaking even more for Miller. Assuming an equal sample size to the 35-49 group, Miller would have to be polling at least 45% to Murkowski’s 33% (+12) among the 18-34 demographic (McAdams would be polling the same: 19%).
But that may not be the end of the story. If you compare the sampling error of the “Under 50″ group to the sampling error of the “35-49″ group, you can see that the Under 50 group has reduced its sampling error from 6.5% to 5.5%. This suggests that the sample size of the entire Under 50 group is at least half again as large as the 35-49 group alone, but probably not fully doubled.
This is relevant because it suggests that the missing 18-34 demographic probably has a smaller sample size than the 34-49 group, which means Miller would have to be doing even better among that group to produce the averages shown in the Under 50 segmentation.
Interesting stuff. Fun to dissect.
Two Major Obama Supporters Bite the Dust at NBC and CNN
Jeff Zucker has been fired over at NBC.
Jonathan Klein has also been removed as head of CNN.
These two men are big Obama Kool-Aid drinkers, and pushed for their respective networks to become Obama cheerleaders in 2008.
Zucker did this, in large part, because he believed betting everything on Obama would mean that, once president, Obama would give big payback perks to GE, NBC’s parent company, and Zucker would look like a major hero to his corporate overlords for increasing their profitability with this newfound love coming from the new White House.
That really didn’t happen though, because Obama does not reward any of those who’ve served him. Their reward, in his mind, should be limited to the joy they get in worshipping at his feet and doing his bidding. SERVICE to “The One” is, thus, it’s own reward.
Klein over at CNN is the dumber of the two network executives, which is saying a lot for anyone who has watched Zucker tear NBC down from the top network to the fourth. FOURTH. That’s staggering. To go from first place to last, while raking in millions of dollars a year in salary. It’s stunning GE let this man get away with it.
But, what did Klein and CNN get for throwing out all credibility in service of Obama?
Aside from tainting their long-established brand, neither of them got anything out of that deal.
Now that Comcast has purchased the networks of NBC, and now that Zucker has been booted to the curb, we’re waiting to see how Obama is served by the media in the days ahead.
It’s clear Obama-worship is not profitable, and will not lead to high ratings.
If either was true, then GE would not have sold money-losing NBC to Comcast, and NBC would have never lost money because its shameless and relentless Obama promotion would have kept the network at number one (provided viewers were as infatuated with Obama as Zucker seemed to believe they were).
Do you think NBC can recover with a new president?
Will CNN ever be seen as anything but a Democrat propaganda channel?
What do you think this bodes for coverage of Obama in the national media for the last two years of his term?
CNN claims Obama's speeches are like sex
CNN claims Obama’s speeches are like sex.
In other news, CNN doesn’t know what sex is. Or hasn’t been doing it right.
We’d invite CNN to Boystown for a little edumacation, but figure Anderson Cooper could teach them anything we could, so let’s spare them the trip and save up that money to buy a clue.
Has the media lovefest with Obama jumped the shark yet?
Because it’s sure gotten a whole lot creepier lately, that’s for damn sure.
Surgeon General Sanjay Gupta?
Truly the most bizarre pick Obama’s made yet: CNN’s Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General.
We still don’t even believe that’s a real nomination.
If Obama’s raiding CNN’s staff for men, we wonder what position Anderson Cooper wants to assume.
Snark.
That’s funny because an evening at Splash in New York will teach you all you need to know about that, silly.
But, we do wonder which of the many odd things Gupta has said through the years will ultimately cause him to pull a Richardson and withdraw his name from consideration. Remember, Jocelyn Elders was forced out of that job for making a relatively innocuous comment about masturbation. Gupta has said much, much worse.
Care to make a list?
Kathy Griffin outs Anderson Cooper on New Year's Eve Live TV
Anderson Cooper is, like Caroline Kennedy, another child of privilege lavished with attention and spotlight disproportionate to his actual talent, abilities, and intellect. We liked him as the creepy original host of TV’s “The Mole”, but find him strange and offputting as a CNN anchor (and committed Obama cheerleader). We also wish he, like a lot of other open-secrets in the world of politics and entertainment (including prominent members of Obama’s new staff, at least one sitting Republican Senator (who is having an affair with a male staffer at the Department of Defense), and one or two of the Ocean’s 11 gang), would just come clean already.
Evidently, Kathy Griffin does too…and at the end of the clip above, she pretty much outs Anderson Cooper, telling him she doesn’t go over to CNN to knock the, uh, you can hear for yourself, out of his mouth. And she used the plural. Meaning more than one at a time. Never knew Andy was such a glutton.
If we were Obama, we’d keep Griffen away from the Chief of Staff’s office. Goodness knows what she’d say to former Illinois Congressmen she’d find there (or what she’d knock out of their mouths).
