Month: January 2008

A blogger does some research — easily replicated — and discovers a statistical oddity in the NH Primary.

In districts that use hand-counting of ballots, Obama ended up with a 7.5% advantage. In districts using Diebold’s notorious “Accuvote” machines, Clinton ended up with a 5.5% advantage. If you apply the hand-count rate to the entire state, Obama would have won with a lead near to what the polls, exit interviews and such were claiming.

Hanky panky? Or just wonky machines? Who knows — regardless of the reason, there’s certainly been enough evidence presented over the past 4 years to indicate that the Diebold voting machines are unreliable — not only prone to error, but also easily hacked. And yet, they’re still in use.

EDIT, FOR THOSE WHO HAVEN’T YET FIGURED IT OUT: The thesis statement of this post is the final paragraph. I’m not shouting “tampering!!” I think that if anything, this points (yet again) to the need to use only verifiable paper balloting.

A couple of things:

1) The best part about all this 4th Edition license hullaballoo: Watching people who obviously have no idea what the hell they’re talking about “debate” issues of copyright, licensing and publishing. Even better: Publishers publicly committing to the license (and the 5K fee), without having seen the terms of said license yet. Fucking PRICELESS.

2) Best line about the primaries that I’ve seen all day: “As the exit polls have shown, the Democratic primary is turning into a battle between the people that pay for Social Security and those that collect it. “

I forgot to mention yesterday — Zoe, our dog, managed to get into a tupperware container while nobody was looking. Said container had what was left of my Christmas magic cookie bars.

Said bars containing a fairly high amount of semi-sweet chocolate.

She ate them all.

Dumbass.

took her to the vet, who induced vomiting and then tried (only partially successfully) to get her to eat activated charcoal to counteract the theobromine toxicity. We pointed out that if the vet had put the charcoal in a tupperware container, or the garbage, or told her NO…..she would have eaten it without a problem.

She came home last night, and generally moped, and had the….ahem….digestive troubles we were expecting.

At about 5:00 am, though, she threw up a bunch of the charcoal, and threw up again later in the morning. She’s gone back to the vet, where they’ve given her an injection to settle her stomach, and are keeping her under observation. The vet thinks that the charcoal did the majority of its job, but that she might have gotten a low-dose poisoning nonetheless. Hopefully, nothing worse develops.