LOL Straw Polls

POKER

Long time no blog. I've been figuring out a few things here and there, a few steps forward and a couple back. Steadily making some progress but I think I still have a ton of work to get back to where I was at the beginning of the year. I've been exporting some of my HEM reports to Excel and conditionally formatting them to see what stands out in certain situations compared to others with some fairly good (if not obvious results).

POLITICS

Now I'm not an American citizen, but considering that the Canadian media covers the US presidential campaigns more than our own elections, the degree to which our economy rides on hoping the elephant sleeping beside us doesn't roll the wrong way, and my proximity to the border, I think I am allowed to have an opinion. Plus it's my blog =) Here's some foreign perspective. And I have to warn you that it's fairly narrowly focused and blatantly so because the entire process, from my perspective, is a complete sham on par with having potripper call you down with 9 high and knowing plain as day that you've been superused. You can't have a real democratic presidential campaign until this problem is seen for what it is and fixed.

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I continue to be baffled by the complete media blackout of Ron Paul's campaign. Quite reminiscent of '07/'08. If all you watched was the news -- from any 3 letter source -- you'd think this was the Bachman / Pawlenty / Palin show and everyone else was already an also-ran.

When you consider that Paul receives by far the most campaign contributions from members of the military of any party, doesn't have a lobbyist in sight, and has the most Constitutionally consistent voting record of anybody and is thus considered to be a radical  fringe candidate, it tells you just how far off base and out of touch the GOP -- and Congress as a whole -- has become.

So why won't the mainstream media touch this radical politician with a ten foot pole? I mean, that's what they live for. Radical, fringe, shocking, stand out from the crowd = ratings. That's why they headline cats playing with iPads instead of the ho-hum everyday people dying in Africa. There is something very, very wrong in the US when the media is making a concerted, counter-intuitive effort to guide the course of democracy by propelling 2nd and 3rd tier candidates into the spotlight and stuffing 1st tier candidates (if not the outright front runner) into an also-ran pigeon hole.

Case in point. Results as % of votes cast. Top 3 is a numerical count.
(scroll right for averages and top 3 finishes and scroll down for charts):

Standard article following the latest results:

• "Bachman won today's straw poll, narrowly edging out Paul" [ 3 more paragraphs about Bachman ].
• [ 2 paragraphs about Pawlenty].
• [ 2 paragraphs about the rest of the field - excluding Paul ].
• [ 2 paragraphs filler to end the article ].

 Seriously? Paul crushed 3rd place Pawlenty by 2:1 and was only 1% off a win and all he gets is an participatory mention in one sentence of Bachman's 3 paragraphs?

This should be the consistent top tier Paul and Romney / up and coming Bachman show with a side of Sarah Who? The people who are actually listening to the speeches and looking at platforms have given fairly clear indication of which ones they like. But I would be very shocked if you took a random public poll which resulted in Paul and Romney being the clear favourites the way their head-and-shoulders above average straw poll results would indicate.

There's something obviously very scary about Ron Paul to a lot of powerful people. Maybe it's time to find out what considering the state of the status quo broken government.