The sad part is, though, that his analysis is so bad, it would honestly surprise me if anyone were actually paying for this. Take this attempted broadside from Sunday. It’s full of so much bad math and so little critical thinking that I lack the time tonight to address it all. Here are the highlights, though.

The first objective claim he makes about the Strategic Vision poll in question, after his rambling anecdotal sideshow, is that the results are underdispersed. This claim is entirely unsupported in the most literal sense, in that he neither demonstrates what kind of distribution the data should have followed, nor does he show that the actual variance of the data contradicts that predicted distribution. The technical term for this is ‘hand waving,’ however when our professor waves his hands we at least can check the textbook for confirmation. Silver’s just making this up as he goes along, though.

From there we get some more anecdotal rambling, in which a Democrat politican’s words are recorded with the same kind of blind, unquestioning support that a Hitler Youth would have recorded Der Führer’s own speeches. After all that, we get what is supposed to be a smoking gun: A different poll with different results.

However it’s not surprising that Cannaday’s poll has different results. It is conducted with a different pool of students (high school seniors in his district, not students from all high school grades all across the state). The samples were not random (special education students were picked out, according to Silver). The survey environment was different (students were questioned in a school environment with authority figures present, rather than asked at home by strangers over a telephone).

No amount of special pleading can make the two surveys comparable, especially given the menacing glares of teachers ensuring the students try on the tests, and the teachers themselves under political pressure from a state officeholder.

And again, Nate Silver knows this. Different methodologies testing different pools, with samples drawn using different methods, will produce different results. He chooses to disregard this in order to shill for his Democrat superiors.

I sure hope he’s getting paid, because his integrity was surely worth at least a combo meal at Carl’s Jr, with large fries.

The leaders of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, National Organization of Black Elected Legislative Women, The National Black Caucus of Local Elected Officials, and the National Association of Black County Officials wrote a letter to David Honig of the Broadband Opportunity Coalition praising the group for its position against Net Neutrality. The BOC is a group focused on getting high-quality Internet access available to more Americans, and the BOC has not lined up in favor of the Google-Obama Net Neutrality scam. That is why the above groups support of the BOC, because the plan will harm the very expansion of Internet capacity and deployment that the group was formed to promote.

So naturally, pro-Net Neutrality groups came out and gave reasoned responses… no sorry, I don’t know what came over me. That’s not what happened at all. These Democrat-dominated groups were accused of being bought shills for telecommuncations firms!

Ready the popcorn. These ‘black’ groups have called that a racist accusation. Apparently it is racist and ‘paternalistic’ to say that they are incapable of having opinions of their own, but are merely puppets of some corporate masters. I suppose the telecommuncations firms are ‘white’ in Democrat-speak. But regardless, Multichannel News describes some good fun for us on the right to watch:

Some fans of network neutrality countered that the groups were under the influence of cable and telco operators, leading to some heated exchanges, calls for apologies, and charges of racism and paternalism.

“In publicly attacking several of the nation’s leading civil rights organizations, one organization recently published a statement that minorities - blacks, Hispanics and even Asians’ are supporting points of view that hurt the people they claim to represent. Other organizations have regularly peddled these and other offensive claims to the news media and public via Web posting,” wrote the officials.

They branded the attackers digital elites who wanted high-speed broadband for their personal enjoyment. “Many feel that these organizations are pushing a regulatory perspective that would regressively shift the costs of bandwidth onto middle- and low-income consumers,” they said. “We urge you to ignore the destructive racial rhetoric peddled by elite digital organizations…”

The ‘black’ groups got two things right, though: First, it is the Internet firms that are rich and powerful here, not the telecommuncations firms. Second, the technologists pushing the Obama-Google Single Payer Internet plans really do want their intensive, high-bandwidth, low-latency Internet use subsidized by everyone else, including the urban poor.

Opposing Net Neutrality is the bipartisan, mainstream position. The only people who support it are big Internet firms, freeloaders downloading movies and video games from the Pirate Bay, and socialists who want to nationalize the Internet.

Don’t take me at my word. Listen to her. Does she sound like someone who will take this country somewhere different from where Barbara Boxer wants to take us?

It’s so frightening, in fact, that Senate Democrats think the FCC needs to be more plain spoken about their plans, currently being hidden in overly-fancy language. It’s not impossible to speak about Internet policy in plain language. It’s just not possible to plan fascist takeovers of industries in plain language without scaring voters, is all. Which is why they don’t do it.

Meanwhile, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel refutes Net Neutrality proponents who claim that the practices NN is meant to oppose, are not theoretical:

Net-neutrality advocates raise the specter of providers censoring websites by slowing or cutting off access to them in the absence of new rules. Yet they cite only three isolated instances of this in the past five years. Each was quickly resolved.

Once again, we get more evidence that Net Neutrality is really just the crisis that progressives are using to grow government. We have to stop them.

I received nothing from Fiorina. However DeVore’s campaign sent me DeVore’s 2006 fight for “Jessica’s Law”, a large expansion of legal protections of society against the sexual predators and killers of children. DeVore stood up against Democrats looking to be lenient, or to use a phrase Democrats use against us all the time, “putting dollars ahead of childrens’ lives.”

DeVore also fought to expand California’s predation laws, making it a crime for an adult to lure a 13 or 14 year old youth away from home, and expanding forfeiture of the tools (presumably computers and other telecommunications devices) used by criminals to accomplish that. This provides protection when a minor is lured away but not (yet) attacked.

So now she’s launched prematurely, shot the wad of endorsements she has in the middle of a week, rushed to pander to the right by appearing in the OC Register, but even that’s not enough. Now she’s making outrageous attacks on Chuck DeVore and the rest of us who favor an Internet free of burdensome government regulation.

I’ve been given a transcript of part of her appearance with Ed Morrissey, in relation to the video out where she endorses big government on the Internet, as follows:

Well, thanks for giving me the opportunity. First, one of the unfortunate habits of my primary opponent is he tends to cut and splice things I say and mischaracterize my positions and my record. I am against further regulation or taxation of the internet. And if you listen to the entire conversation, what you would find is what I was talking about very explicitly, was the reality that the Internet is used today for the exploitation of women and children. It is used as a tool to facilitate human trafficking in sex slaves, and it is used as a tool to facilitate child pornography. And we must land hard on those criminal activities that are going on on the Internet, particularly when they impact children. So for anyone to try and defend criminal activities, particularly those kind of criminal activities, on the Internet, I just find, frankly, unconscionable.

This attack is, first of all, ironic: I doubt she could demonstrate a voting record of DeVore’s that actually favors child rapists. Did she even try? But at the same time, her supporters have attacked DeVore as “lacking integrity” because he questions her own pro-life credentials. But DeVore’s voting record is much more clear than Fiorina’s own record on life.

Does she really want to get into this battle? The DeVore camp tells me they’re already compiling the information on the Assemblyman’s record against child rapists, and I’m sure we’ll be hearing about it soon enough. He’s going to refute this desperate, flailing attack with a conclusive response.

But we will still be left with no definitive answer from Carly Fiorina on basic life questions: Does she favor legalized abortion on demand? Does she favor government-funded embryonic stem-cell research? Does she think Roe v. Wade or Planned Parenthood v. Casey were correctly decided? Does she favor the Hyde amendment? Would she support or reject Obamacare with abortion subsidies? Would she have voted to confirm or reject Justice Sotomayor? Would she vote to confirm any justice not a strict constructionist?

If someone has a definitive transcript, essay, or video with Fiorina answering these basic, vital questions, I would love to see it. I’ve looked and not found anything. I welcome emails from Fiorina supporters or staffers, and I pledge that if I receive such evidence in email, I will post about it fairly at RedState. I earnestly would love to be shown that both our Senate candidates are strong on life, but until now only one candidate’s been willing to show me anything.

I’m waiting.

The best thing about the DMCA is that its long arm can’t extend offshore, so Americans have been able to bypass it when needed by working with non-Americans who retain their rights to such technically-critical activities as reverse engineering.

But now the Obama administration is looking to promote an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a trojan horse for a Global DMCA. Or worse actually, because the DMCA only requires ISPs to act on specific copyrightholder requests to shut down accused infringers. Says Cory Doctorow, the ACTA would require ISPs to be active nannies policing copyright, and would outright kill Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, and probably Twitter. Further, your complete access to the Internet could be shut down, without warning, just because you are accused of being a copyright infringer.

Elections have consequences. How’s teaching the Republicans a lesson working out, libertarians?

Up until now, the DC types have all been supporting Carly Fiorina in our primary, even though she had not yet declared her candidacy, and had yet shown either an inability or an unwillingness to campaign to the Republican voters of this state. Thus, that early support had failed to move any dials as Assemblyman Chuck DeVore has raised money well, gained loyal grass roots support, and ran ahead of Fiorina against Boxer in polls. But now, with the fallout of Dede Scozzafava’s blowup spreading nationwide, events are moving more quickly.

The NRSC is conceding its positions in primaries, pulling a crutch out from under Fiorina’s already-limping campaign. Conservative DC types are taking advantage of the new neutrality, too, starting with Senator Jim DeMint endorsing DeVore, while Fiorina has the backing of South Carolina’s other Senator, Lindsey Graham.

I know which name and which endorsement have more clout with the grass roots, the Tea Partiers, and other activists who will be essential to any Republican challenge of Boxer. So does Fiorina, who decided to try to drown out this news by announcing her formal candidacy.

Too little, too late. We’ve driven a wedge into the foundation of the anti-conservative establishment, and we’re going to crack it up before we’re done. We will judge each candidate on his or her own merits, and pick the one that’s best able to represent us and win.

Sometimes, in some races, that will mean the most reliably conservative candidate will not win. That’s fine, as long as we’re giving each candidate a fair shake, and not reflexively picking the candidate with the more ‘moderate’ image. In the case of the California Senate we must especially avoid that mistake. Carly Fiorina is a novice candidate whose campaign has gotten off to a poor start. She’s not ready, and she’s no more likely to beat Boxer than DeVore is.

DeVore will put up a good fight, and he’s proven on the issues. This race is not one of Erick Erickson’s hills to die on, but that doesn’t mean we don’t stand ready to send a big message, and benefit big, from a win in this primary. We in California elect a fair number of Republicans to the House, and we could use all the motivation we can get from the top of the ticket if we want to help take the House back in 2010.

It was remarkable enough when Governors left and right all wrote to the FCC against Net Neutrality. But now when Comcast is on the same side of a dispute as the Electronic Froniter Foundation, that’s a sign that nobody who is aware of the technical issues wants any part of what Barack Obama and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski are planning.

Comcast has been a leader in, well, taking things away from its customers. They are routinely booed on the Internet by active users because of the steps they take to cap and restrict the heaviest users of their resources. And it now comes out that as the FCC has challenged Comcast over some of those restrictions, Comcast has fired back by challenging the legitimacy of the FCC’s expansion into regulating the Internet.

By itself that is not surprising, as Comcast has much to lose from large-scale FCC meddling. However what is surprising is to find that the Electronic Frontier Foundation appears to agree. Says Ars Techinca:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls the agency’s proposed rulemaking a “Trojan Horse” which is “built on a shoddy and dangerous foundation.” Since Congress didn’t give the FCC specific authority in this area, what’s next, worries EFF—an “Internet Decency Statement” pushed by conservatives, or an “Internet Lawful Use Policy” urged on the agency by the Hollywood studios? That’s why the group calls the move “a power grab that would leave the Internet subject to the regulatory whims of the FCC long after Chairman Genachowski leaves his post.”

The EFF is one of those left-leaning ACLU-type groups, so when they agree with a big telecommunications firm on the impropriety of a regulation action, that’s notable. It’s a sign that Obama’s FCC is far out of bounds in its Net Neutrality plans, and that only the farthest left-wing radicals are in favor of what Genachowski is planning for us.

We have to stop him. We have to stop the Obama drive toward Single Payer Internet. It’s the mainstream, common sense position.

I always get a kick out of seeing these little guys running around. You see, when I first set foot in Moreno Valley almost a quarter century ago**, I didn’t see this kind of wildlife running around. We’re at the edge of the desert, and as the town was first being developed, the only things I saw were the big old tumbleweeds rolling down the street on every windy day. Brown, dry, and prickly, they weren’t very friendly to little guys like in that picture above.

But now, years later, the town’s different. All the dry, empty spaces full of tumbleweeds are gone, replaced with buildings with lots of grass, trees, and bright green landscaping. The plants are different, the animals underfoot are different, and even the birds are different. Long ago the only birds I’d ever see are big, ugly blackbirds. Now there’s a variety around, and I hear all different kinds of bird songs in the mornings instead of just the honking of those blackbirds.

This is all anecdotal, and proves little, but it illustrates a greater point: it is not in dispute at all that human development changes the local climate. When people move into a desert area, the area gets wetter, greener, and friendlier to life that can move in afterward. Likewise, as a town builds into a bigger, older, more populous city, all of that greenery starts getting replaced with heat-absorbing concrete and asphalt, raising temperatures in the vicinity.

That last part is called the Heat Island effect. It’s real, it’s known, and it’s why the traditional temperature records going back 100 or more years are virtually useless for tracking the greater climate of the world. The only valid records we have for temperatures, therefore, are the satellite records that avoid such local effects. Those only go back 30 years or so.

And that is so little time on a geological scale. Too little to confirm any theory as the truth, inconvenient or otherwise.

* Wal-Mart is too efficient and had none left, sadly.

** Yes, I feel old writing that.

I’ve written in this space for a while about who the real Astroturfers are in the Net Neutrality fight. Google – and its puppets like Free Press – are promoting this idea that it’s a struggle between big telecommunications firms, and the little guys. Except the little guys are actually bigger Internet firms. The corporations pressing for Net Neutrality are Fortune 500 and even Dow Jones Industrial Average firms, with billions in cash ready to be spent on Net Neutrality, trying to defeat Proposition 8, or even promoting Barack Obama.

That last one makes the FCC’s rush to regulate look bad, given all the placements of Google people within the Obama administration as well as the nearly one million dollars that Google employees gave to the Obama-Biden campaign. How do we know that the secretive Obama White House isn’t directing the FCC to pay off Google?

After all, we know he’s giving donors special treatment. In fact, it has come out that FCC Chairman Genachowski himself was a major fundraiser for Obama, pulling in over a half million for the campaign. Why shouldn’t we believe that this is all a big circle of back scratching in the Obama adminstration, when he refuses to release the kinds of information we need to determine otherwise?

The President has played political games with information all along. He dangles his birth certificate on a string in order to distract the right. He’s keeping as little of the Obamacare agenda in writing as possible, because he knows if we read it and expose his plans, we can win the fight, so we end up with ridiculous spectacles like a Senate committee voting on a bill that hasn’t been written yet. And now he’s playing footsie with donors in secret.

We must encourage and join Senator McCain and Representative Blackburn in their fresh legislative efforts to stop the Google/Obama Net Neutrality scheme. We cannot allow this kind of quid pro quo to go unchallenged.

One kind celebrates big government and progressive control over America. Carly Fiorina, like Dede Scozzafava, is one of those:

While some of us are fighting hard against the Obama push to nationalize the Internet, Fiorina goes behind our backs and joins them, just as Scozzafava will work with ACORN and Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, Chuck DeVore knows the score and endorses Doug Hoffman.

There are two kinds of Republicans. Some are on our side. Some are more interested in the left. I know which I prefer to represent our party.

As we’re all aware, one of the current targets is Glenn Beck. In particular, Free Press wants to make him out as a paranoid McCarthyite.

Supposedly he’s seeing socialists, Marxists, and communists everywhere. Even though Senator McCarthy was right, and Communists had infiltrated our government all the way up to Alger Hiss, we’re supposed to think badly of Red hunting. But let’s look at the people themselves at Free Press, leading special interest promoter of the Fairness Doctrine, ownership diversity rules, and of course Net Neturality. Are they as socialist as Beck thinks?

Let’s start with Free Press Staff shocked at the Socialist menace alleged by Beck. Any socialists hiding under the rocks there?

• Megan Tady has a track record of working for places like In These Times, which billed itself as “The Independent Socialist Newspaper”. Are we to believe she was the contrarian influence there, and not another good Socialist?
• Or how about Lindsy Embree? She was, I’m told, a volunteer for The Catholic Worker, an expressly anti-”capitalist” organization that counted as its ally the Industrial Workers of the World. Surely they’re not Communist, he asked sarcastically?
• Finally there’s Alex Kahn, whose CV includes the dynamite claim of a BA in “Social Thought and Political Economy” from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a degree would have had taken him through a course list with entries like “Black Marxism” and “Marxian Economics.” Did he suffer though all that while disagreeing with the Marxist agenda he was studying? Not likely.

Perhaps these buffoons should have looked in the mirror to find the socialists Beck speaks of? Or maybe they could have talked to the top brass in the office:

• Robert McChesney, co-founder of Free Press, is on the board of Monthly Review, which says of itself that “From the first Monthly Review spoke for socialism and against U.S. imperialism, and is still doing so today.”
• Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press, who voluntarily worked as a staffer for Bernie Sanders, the self-described Independent Socialist in Congress.
• Of course Van Jones was a board member of Free Press; funny how Free Press fails to mention in their hagiographical video about him, that he has a tie with that group. And in 2008 he was quite open about his plans to use “green” economics as a first step towards ending all “capitalism.” He also compared himself with Rosa Parks, saying her first step against Jim Crow was just like his first step against capitalism.

So tell us, again, why we shoudln’t think socialists are all over Free Press, when Free Press sends a trio of Socialists to mock the claim, and has socialists all the way to the top?

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, President Barack Obama, and the rest of the radical left want to use the Net Neutrality movement as the crisis that gives cover to sweeping big government action, allowing the FCC to pick winners and losers and dictate to private individuals and firms how their private property must be run, putting government bureaucrats in charge of the Internet.

The dangers of the administration’s Net Neutrality plans are not theoretical:

Innovation will suffer, and America will no longer house the leading edge of the Internet technology. Wealth will be redistributed, as cash-rich, massive market valued Internet firms will bully and get a free ride on capital-intensive, smaller market valued telecommunications firms. Government will be deeply entrenched and be a costly burden to anyone who conducts business or pleasure on the Internet. One of the drivers of American economic growth will be crippled in a time when we most need new jobs.

Last, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell warns of Internet censorship to come as Genachowski’s sweeping regulations would provide the basis for an Internet “Fairness Doctrine.” He sees what’s going on at the FCC and knows what it is capable of. Some conservatives have signed onto radical socialist groups like Save the Internet because they were led to believe that telecoms would censor them, when in fact they’ve jumped from the frying pan of big corporations to the fire of big government censorship. One can always get a new ISP in a competitive market if a particular firm becomes anti-Christian, anti-2nd Amendment, or anti-Republican in general. Choosing a new government is less practical.

Therefore, now is the time to act. We must tell the FCC to get its hands off of the Internet, allow competition to rule, and to protect the Internet from any threats to our first amendment rights. Everywhere government has taken an active role as Internet Nanny, such as in Australia or the People’s Republic of China, freedom and prosperity have suffered.

Please, Contact the FCC. Let’s flood the system letting them know our opposition to their plans. Google thinks we’ll believe their Orwellian formulation that an Internet under greater regulation will be more open. We know better. Let’s speak up.

I find it entirely unfair that the left gets to try to shout down our side while theirs goes entirely unnoticed. If we don’t at least speak up, then the left’s arguments might get some traction.

So let’s watch carefully. Google has hired Frannie Wellings, the telecommuniations advisor to Senator Byron Dorgan, North Dakota Democrat. Sounds boring, but dig deeper. Dorgan was the author and sponsor of the Senate’s Net Neutrality bill in 2007. Is Google buying access? That’s what the left would say if the parties were reversed.

They’d especially say that when the job that Wellings is taking was just created. She is to be Google’s “federal policy outreach manager.” In other words, she’s going to run Google’s lobbying operations in Washington. Which means either she or people accountable to her are going to be going right back into Dorgan’s office.

Further, before taking the job with Dorgan, Wellings worked at… yup, Free Press, the special interest group that founded and runs Save the Internet.

What a coincidence it is that Google, Save the Internet, and a Democrat Politican are linked like this! Free Press and Google must justify this if they are to continue their shameless attacks on our side, instead of arguing with facts and logic about the benefits and disadvantages of their goal: aggressive regulation of the Internet, centered on an FCC picking winners and losers in private network policy disputes.

That is why Save The Internet is resorting to dishonest smear campaigns in an attempt to shout down and discredit their opponents. They want to win by driving all opposition off the field, turning this debate into the Internet equivalent of the streets of Berlin in Weimar Germany. They must not get away with it.

Save the Internet is a diverse coalition of mostly radical socialist groups like SEIU, ACLU, PIRG, select AFSCME locals, PETA, Democrat Underground, MoveOn.org, AfterDowningStreet.org, and Common Cause, but also a number of corporations and ISPs both foreign and domestic, and even foreign interest groups. There are some mistaken right-wingers and libertarians in there like Glenn Reynolds, the Christian Coalition, and the Gun Owners of America. I would urge them to leave, because the movement has been hijacked, ladies and gentlemen. You are now being used to promote a radical left wing movement.

Their website is full of blatant lies. They claim that Net Neutrality would not be a new regulation, when in fact the whole point of the push is to get new regulations in place backed by the so-called Internet Freedom Preservation Act currently in the House. Obama’s FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski also made that much plain in a recent speech, that he wants the FCC to be an active, aggressive force on the Internet, picking winners and losers in private network policy disputes.

Further, they blatantly lie about who’s on their side, claiming that big corporations are only on the side against Net Neutrality. And while it’s true that the socialist vandals of Save the Internet want total state control over the multi-billion dollar private investments made on the Internet (including Two billion or more that AT&T, Verizon, and others will spend deploying LTE and WiMax high-speed wireless Internet), the fact is there are dozens of corporations part of their coalition, and by their own admission some titans of the Internet are on their side. “Amazon.com, EBay, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Facebook, Skype, and Yahoo” are all on their side. Some of those are small companies, but Intel and Microsoft are members of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Microsoft’s market capitalization stands at over 220 billion dollars today, and Intel’s at half that, $106 billion. The big, bad AT&T itself is only worth $1.2 billion, or about half of one percent of Microsoft. Google, Amazon, and EBay are also featured in the Fortune 500. You cannot tell me only side has the big bucks in this fight for state control over the Internet.

But despite such blatant falsehood, Save the Internet presses on to accuse its opposition of being ‘astroturf,’ that is, fake grassroots involvement. Now I would love for someone to accuse me of that, because I and anyone familiar with my financial situation would never stop laughing. Of course, they don’t mention the Open Internet Coalition backed by the above Internet titans, oh no. Only opponents like Broadband for America, a group promoting greater Internet access across America, gets that tag. I mean sure, when I think ‘corporate astroturf’, I think of BfA members like the National Black Chamber of Commerce, Child Safety Task Force, Hispanic Leadership Fund, the Livestock Marketing association, and the Jewish Energy Project. That’s just the corporate Axis of Evil right there, Save the Internet wants you to think.

I do disagree with some of its members, notably AT&T which wants to exclude its wireless Internet from the same rules that wired Internet providers would have to play by. This even though the FCC severely limits competition with its wireless services, and grants legal protection to its broadcasts from interference.

LTE and WiMax are most likely a glimpse of the future of last mile Internet into American homes. And while I don’t think its government-backed (by FCC or by franchise monopoly) providers should be able to set network policies to harm competitors such as Skype or YouTube, I think competition in that field is vital to our well being. The last thing we need is competition-killing regulation of every router and wire in America, increasing the costs of business high enough that only the richest companies can compete, and paving the way to the Socialist dream of Single Payer Internet in America.

So we all need to look hard at just who is pushing this agenda, and note that every time they point a finger, three fingers are pointing back at themselves.

It’s no wonder that polls show her running against Barbara Boxer no better than Chuck DeVore, despite Fiorina’s wide reputation of being a pro-abortion “social moderate.” One would think that a candidate who, in the public eye, neutralizes Boxer’s key issue of abortion would do better in the polling, but Fiorina’s failure to achieve anything in the polls is a testament to her failure to campaign effectively and to reach out to the Republican base. Republicans would be critical to her fight against the united front of the Democrat party, the unions, and the press. If she can’t get us on her side, she can’t win.

So why, then, does she snub us and instead turn to the deep pockets? Does she intend to run as a Schwarzenegger-ite “post-partisan?” Does she even have a plan for victory? Even Meg Whitman showed up to Indian Wells, made good speeches, and earned respect even from supporters of other candidates. She put pressure on her opponents, and Steve Poizner did not impress when he replied.

Senator Boxer will have to make a mistake if a Republican is going to beat her in 2010. I doubt Carly Fiorina is capable of applying the pressure to Boxer it will take to make that happen.

But now, he’s flushed his own reputation into the toilet with his campaign against Strategic Vision. The pretend math, and lack of serious analysis and justification, in his series of posts against the company is so bad, I expect him any day now to start ranting about how he hasn’t seen a given poll, but he still thinks that Obama has the consistency to pull it out just like the Reds used to. Nate Silver has become the Joe Morgan of politics.

The plain truth is, much like a Joe Morgan broadcast, the Nate Silver articles leave one knowing nothing he didn’t know to begin with. Take the original piece. Here, Silver’s analysis boils down to this:

1. Manufacture two sets of data using a methodology with no justification given. Why strip out everything but Democrats and Republicans? Either the polls are doctored or they aren’t.
2. Make pretty pictures.
3. Eyeball the pictures.
4. Scream that they aren’t consistent enough, not like his old Reds teams, so they must be FRAUDS!

He attempts to provide a thin veneer of justification for his work by citing Benford’s Law. However that’s completely ridiculous, as Benford’s Law applies to a) early digits of numbers in data sets spanning b) many orders of magnitude c) smoothly. Silver’s work covers a) last digits of numbers in data sets spanning b) a range of about 30-60 c) bunched together around 50 because polls are more likely to be taken in close races. Even mentioning Benford’s Law in this context by most people would show a fundamental lack of understanding, much like Joe Morgan and other analysts when they use Wins to praise pitchers and RBIs to praise batters.

However Nate Silver knows better. He’s not the Joe Morgan of politics. He’s more like Joe’s old teammate Pete Rose here. Rose was great as a player, and a fraud as a manager, while Silver was great as a baseball analyst and has now become a fraud as a political analyst.

Compound that Benford’s Law deception with the use of a picture of a correlated data set. He asserts out of thin air that the distribution of last digits should be uniform. How is this the case? We all know that close races are polled more often than blowouts, and Silver in particular should, since he spent the whole last Presidential election watching some states come in more frequently than others. All it would take for Strategic Vision to get a distribution like he shows, is to have a bunch of polls that show something like, oh, R 48 D 49 Other 1 Undecided 2. But we don’t see that because, guess what, Silver stripped out the Others and Undecideds!

He hasn’t backed down since that original article, either. The willful mathematical incompetence continues in a followup article, in which he exhibits the same mathematical ham-handedness:

1. Asserts a distribution of last digits without justification
2. Invokes Benford’s Law in a way only a mathematical illiterate could
3. Heavily relies on charts and not established statistical tests to draw conclusions about data sets.

In another followup, Silver attempts to refute a specific poll by… making up his own simulated poll results. And apparently distance from Atlanta, GA has a proven correlation with fraud, or something. Perhaps Coca Cola makes you better at math?

Nate Silver once had a reputation. Even if his political commentary was left-leaning, his math could be trusted. Not anymore. He has shredded that solid reputation to become a political mercenary, attacking a firm’s integrity for partisan political reasons. I’m sure he won’t even notice that Republicans and independents no longer have any reason to trust him, with all the rabid cheering he’ll get from the radical left. But deep down, I wonder if he felt it when he shed that last bit of integrity to get page views.

Is Strategic Vision making up poll results? I have no idea, but that’s just it: Nate Silver’s rabid crusade won’t tell me that. Actual, mathematically-sound analysis would have to be done to draw any conclusions about that. Silver has done none, because Silver is only interested in scoring political points for the Democrats, rather than using math to ferret out truth.

Net Neutrality started out as a broad-based movement on the Internet. It wasn’t a left-wing thing at all, but rather was something most of us could support, because it was merely a movement to ensure (usually government franchise-backed) ISP firms could not abuse their monopoly or oligopoly power to coerce their customers to use other services by the firm, such as phone service in the case of AT&T or television service in the case of Comcast. I believe this is a reasonable request. It doesn’t prevent investors in Internet technology from profiting, but rather merely prevents them from abusing government-granted market power to benefit other businesses.

However on Monday, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski went beyond that when he outlined his six principles of Net Neutrality in a speech to the Brookings Institution. What he proposes is an intrusive, never-ending government hand in the growth and management of the Internet, one that is clearly aimed at the Socialist goal of “single-payer Internet,” run with the same agile reactiveness as the DMV or the TSA.

He starts off innocently enough when he speaks of “non-discrimination,” and in fact says the right things about an important problem:

The fifth principle is one of non-discrimination — stating that broadband provider cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications. This means they cannot block or degrade lawful traffic over their networks, or pick winners by favoring some content or applications over others in the connection to subscribers’ homes. Nor can they disfavor an Internet service just because it competes with a similar service offered by that broadband provider.

This is all true. If Genachowski stopped here, I would not oppose him. I don’t agree that the FCC must act in this space; rather I believe the answer to this problem lies at the state level. Ending or reworking franchise monopolies and duopolies on phone and cable television would go further in fixing the problem government created, than creating more new government.

The FCC Chairman does not stop there, though. He goes on to speak of how government needs to play an active role in monitoring all network maintenance activities and configurations of ISPs and their infrastructure, in the name of “transparency:”

We cannot afford to rely on happenstance for consumers, businesses, and policymakers to learn about changes to the basic functioning of the Internet. Greater transparency will give consumers the confidence of knowing that they’re getting the service they’ve paid for, enable innovators to make their offerings work effectively over the Internet, and allow policymakers to ensure that broadband providers are preserving the Internet as a level playing field. It will also help facilitate discussion among all the participants in the Internet ecosystem, which can reduce the need for government involvement in network management disagreements.

In this fairly harmless-sounding paragraph lies much danger. For one of the aims of the socialist perversion of Net Neutrality is to prohibit ISPs from offering different “tiers” of service, giving customers who pay more money a higher priority over other customers. Should Genachowski get his way, regulators would be positioned to prohibit that, just as the far left internet users want. You see, people who download lots of things off of YouTube and the Pirate Bay, as well as firms like Google who seek to make money off of services like YouTube, would benefit if ISPs are required to offer all customers an “all you can eat” plan. Such plans effectively force casual, low-intensity users to subsidize the constant downloaders. Great for some, terrible for others, and totally inappropriate for government to mandate.

Further, Genachowski attacks the fundamental right of property owners to control their property when he says this. He openly acknowledges that he wants the FCC to have an active role in resolving “network management disagreements,” in which outsiders can complain to the FCC about a private computer network’s configuration. Presumably the FCC would then grant itself the power to compel holders of networks to change such configurations on demand. Why else demand transparency if not to start making changes?

The Internet is not a single network. It is a network of networks, all of which talk to each other through standardized protocols. When I send this post to RedState, for example, it will travel over five different networks: Mine, Verizon, Alter.net, Level 3, and ThePlanet. This is not an ecosystem. This is a neighborhood, with property lines that are clearly drawn.

Genachowski is showing himself to be a tool of the radical left when he attempts to use the Net Neutrality banner to conquer the whole Internet, or at least the US-based parts of it, and put them under total government control. He must be stopped.

Fiorina now says cancer treatment is the reason for her evasiveness so far. And while nobody wishes she would skimp on her cancer treatment, or hope for anything less than a full recovery for her, I join Pejman Yousefzadeh in being skeptical of this explanation.

I am skeptical for two reasons. The first is the reason Pejman gives: if Ms. Fiorina is capable of virtually attending an anti-cancer summit via video feed, surely she could at least do the same for her limping Senate campaign? She has strong leadership support for her campaign, and surely could have gotten this accomodation had she put in the effort.

Secondly, I have been sent a recent itinerary of hers. If she could join former President Clinton in Milan, Italy for a business conference, surely she could make at least one day trip to Indian Wells to address the Republicans who are to give blood, sweat, tears, and money to get her elected over an entrenched incumbent Senator? I hear Southwest Airlines has many flights from the Bay Area down here running all day long.

I hesitate to write this, because I naturally am gunshy over her cancer. Mark Kilmer taught me more about cancer than I ever wanted to know, unfortunately. It is possible to be strong, unflinching, and productive while enduring cancer treatment, and a relapse can be swift and brutal. I wish her a full and complete recovery.

But at the same time, Ms. Fiorina cannot expect to win this race that way. She may get some of us in the primary to pull our punches due to the way we feel for her in this troubling time, but the unions, the press, and the Democrats will not. If she is going to be able to win this election, she must be confident enough in her health to give her all, and she must show us now that she is capable of doing it.

Because if she can’t win the general, I echo Pejman and wish that she would sit this one out, give her cancer treatment her all, and return another year. In the meantime she could take up writing or radio, engaging Republicans and selling herself to the base as well as the party leadership. Perhaps in time she could challenge Senator Feinstein, or maybe even try for a House seat.

But this does not appear to be Carly Fiorina’s year.

* I would attend but I am a) sick, b) usually must get around on foot, and c) am 60 miles of desert terrain away. Trips like that require special reasons and arrangements, and are just out of the question when battling a cold and after the closed primary amendment was withdrawn.