Can We Use Ron Paul To MEASURE Media Bias?

Posted by James Bowery on Wednesday, 08 August 2007 16:29.

There are two basic hypotheses explaining the profound disparity between Ron Paul’s online popularity and his dismal showing in “scientific” polls:

1) New Media users are profoundly different from the populous in their preferences for President.

2) The Old Media is profoundly biased against the populous’s real preferences for President but the populous is so dependent on the Old Media for information that the populous finds itself effectively unrepresented at election time.

What would be a fair test of these two hypotheses?

If #2 is correct, an election isn’t an adequate test since it is merely reflects the anti-democratic biases of the Old Media, so we can’t really conclude anything from an election in which a “long shot” candidate is defeated.

I would suggest that a real scientific poll wouldn’t ask people about which candidate they prefer, but rather work like a dating service, asking people about their preferences: matching the preferences of the people to the positions of the candidates.

By comparing the outcome of this position preference poll to the outcome of the current “scientific” polls of people asked to choose from among candidates, we would see a measure of the degree to which the people were being mislead by the Old Media.

To construct the questionnaire properly, see Why the Political Compass is Inherently Vectorist and How to Correct It. The result of comparing “scientific” pick-a-candidate polls to such a match up between the policy positions of candidates and voters would be a measure of how much, and in what policy dimensions (and directions in those dimensions), the media is biased.

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Posted by Proofreader on Wed, 08 Aug 2007 19:11 | #

Ron Paul’s Jewish adviser, Burt Blumert :

In 1988 I was chairman of Ron’s first presidential campaign. Lew has been his friend and associate since 1975, and served as Ron’s chief of staff in Congress.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blumert/blumert123.html

Don’t miss this stuff from another member of his staff, Gary North, and more relevant to the topic of this entry (with some interesting insights as wel into the Council on Foreign Relations and their role in the US presidency) :

When I joined his Congressional staff in June, 1976, he was the most junior Congressman, having been sworn in only two months earlier. The Democrat incumbent had been given a position in the Federal bureaucracy, and he had resigned his office. Paul won the special election.

I wrote his newsletters. I also did research on issues coming before Congress. In my three-person tiny office was Dr. John W. Robbins, a former student of Hans Sennholz in economics and of Gottfried Dietze in political science. In the main office was Bruce Bartlett, who later became one of the leading defenders in Washington of supply-side economics. This was a high-powered staff for a Congressman with two months’ seniority.

Unlike every other Congressman, he had no administrative assistant. That meant he ran a decentralized office. Staffers reported to him, not to some professional screener.

When I joined the staff, little did I suspect that three decades later, he would be a candidate for President, with a campaign bank account with a couple of million (depreciated) dollars in it. There was no Web in 1976. There were no desktop computers other than the Altair, a brand-new gadget for techies.

There was no Alexa Web traffic ranking. To use Alexa, I used Google to search for these names: Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Rudy Giuliani. I then selected the top Google link for each name. One by one, I entered these on http://www.Alexa.com Oddly. enough, I had selected the names in order of their Alexa rankings.

* http://www.RonPaul2008.com 23,60,0
* http://www.MittRomney.com 65,50,0
* http://www.JohnMcCain.com 106,5,00
* http://www.JoinRudy2008.com 108,5,00

Barack Obama’s site ranks 21,000. Hillary Clinton’s is 22,000. John Edwards’s is 59,000.

Ron Paul is #3 in the digital race. Everyone else is an also-ran.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north552.html

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Fri, 10 Aug 2007 06:15 | #

Randall Burns’ assessment of Mitt Romney is ... what’s the word I want? ... What’s the word government press secretaries use when two leaders emerge from talks in which they couldn’t agree on anything and hated each others’ guts? ... “Constructive”? ... No that’s not it ... Oh, “frank,” I think ... Right, “frank.” “The two leaders emerged from ‘frank’ talks today at Camp David ...” OK, well Randall Burns made a ... “frank” ... assessment of Mitt Romney tonight over at Vdare.com:

I was recently reading about Romney’s net worth of between $190 million and $250 million. [...] I must disagree with Joe Guzzardi’s judgment that Romney’s record on immigration is “good.” For example, Romney did very little to address seriously the problem of illegal employers while he was governor of Massachusetts. While Romney has recently attacked Rudy Giuliani for being Mayor of a “Sanctuary City,” Boston was also a sanctuary city during his term as governor. It wasn’t until near the end of his term, when he was already thinking about national office, that he signed an agreement with the federal government to allow thirty Massachusetts State Troopers to be trained in immigration enforcement.

What I see is someone who will seize on high-profile aspects of the immigration issue — but still tries to appeal to both sides. [...]

Is there really any reason to assume that Romney will not support higher real levels of (legal) immigration, possibly through “guest worker” programs that allow fewer political rights and civil liberties for those allowed to immigrate, and greater overall concentration of wealth in America?

Romney’s attitude towards those who are forced to delay — or avoid — having families due to the decrease in wages and living standards that immigration produces is rather cold [...]. And Romney, despite his recent contradictory statements, endorsed a massive amnesty of illegal aliens in 2006 [...]

Remember, those immigration rights don’t come for free. As I have argued before, American citizenship has a quantifiable value — which a loose immigration policy devalues, just as a public company that issues additional stock can “dilute” the value of stock already issued. Romney has no plan on how to maintain the value of American citizenship — or handle the incentives for further illegal immigration his proposals create.

My take as a member of the VDARE.COM Progressive Caucus: It simply doesn’t occur to Romney that those of enormous wealth are affected differently by immigration than working Americans. At least until very recently, his stance was in effect serving a wealthy elite, with which he identifies far more strongly than he identifies with America as a whole.

[...] Romney is a man of considerable natural gifts born to enormous privilege. It is sad that he is so unfeeling towards the nation that gave him so much.

What I find especially difficult to deal with is his hypocrisy. Romney claims to be pro-family, but he promotes the concentration of wealth that makes affordable family formation less likely. It is simply revolting to see a man born to wealth and privilege promoting policies that will deny many poor people the chance to be part of a stable family and which, by the way, systematically increase the rate of abortions in the country.

I might cut Romney some slack if he were really looking at developing that pioneering aspect at the root of his Mormon heritage. [...] But I don’t see Romney taking America in that kind of direction.

I might cut him some slack if I didn’t think he was bright enough to connect the dots.

This hypocrisy and lack of vision and empathy is the reason we are seeing traditionally obedient [Mormon] youth starting to seriously question their elders.

I hope that rebellion cleans house.

Let’s just say Romney would not be ... Burns’ first choice ... and leave it at that, shall we?

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 11 Aug 2007 18:16 | #

Mitt Romney was non-committal when asked if the anchor-baby phenomenon was a problem that needed mending. Right there, that non-committal response all by itself, disqualifies him from consideration as the candidate. Period. Full stop. End of story. Un point, c’est tout. Fini.

Bye-bye, Mitt, and don’t let the swinging door hit you in the butt on the way out, you sad, bought loser you.

Also mentioned in the linked entry are the turds Giuliani and Brownback who get everything about immigration wrong every single time, both men bought and paid for of course, owned lock, stock, and barrel by the deadliest most determined enemies Whitedom has had in a hundred thousand years. Tancredo’s, Hunter’s, and Ron Paul’s positions on the problem, as cited at the same link, are all commendable, exactly as one would’ve predicted.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 11 Aug 2007 18:21 | #

Huckabee’s too, according to the linked article, but he’s an unprincipled man who cannot be trusted any more than the typical member of the Bush family.

Posted by Dove on Sat, 18 Aug 2007 22:11 | #

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This week we’re discussing what it means to be a Washington, DC Insider: someone who is a member of the exclusive think tanks, policy organizations, lobby groups, and other groups that influence and decide policy. You and I, the outsiders, are those who are not part of these clubs.

The bottom line is that the insiders have political and economic power, and the outsiders don’t.

Outsider’s democratic voice amounts to little more than voting on occasion, that day every couple of years where we have our say, and then we are expected to shut up and take it until we have the privilege of voting again.

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http://www.ronpaulonline.com/content/view/190/197/