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Politics : Al Gore vs George Bush: the moderate's perspective -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Math Junkie who wrote (6903)	11/20/2000 10:20:16 AM
From: Slugger	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10042

STAT EXPERTS SAY ODDS ARE STILL AGAINST AL Monday,November 20,2000 By DAN MANGAN and STEVE DUNLEAVY Al Gore is facing long odds - statistically speaking - to make up the 930-vote gap between him and George W. Bush in the Florida hand recount on which he has pinned his hopes. "It's unlikely," Bruce Hansen, economics professor at the University of Wisconsin, said of Gore's chances of picking up enough votes to win the presidency. Hansen said Gore could win an extremely narrow victory - perhaps as close as a single vote - if he gets lucky, under statistical projections. But in any event, a hand recount will not be the slam-dunk that many Gore supporters were counting on. As of yesterday, Hansen was projecting that a recount in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties would boost the vice president by anywhere from a low of 533 votes to a high of 934 votes. Both the top and low ends of the range each have only about a 2.5 percent chance of occurring under the projections, he said. And to get to that top end - which as of yesterday's totals would give Gore only a four-vote lead - "Gore will need several things working in his favor," Hansen said. One of those things would be for Gore to get one so-called "pregnant chad" - or a dimpled ballot hole - for every two "hanging chads" that go his way, Hansen said. Hanging chads are ballots that have pieces of paper hanging from the holes next to a candidate's name. They have been accepted as valid votes, as have ballots that are dimpled, rather than pushed all the way through, by some recounting counties. If the recount results in that 1-to-2 dimpled-to-hanging chads ratio, "then we could get to a dead-even heat," Hansen said. "It all comes down to dimples," Hansen said. "It's pretty shocking to [say] that a presidential race has come down to that, but that's what happens when it's a 50-50 race." John Irons, an economics professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts, thinks Gore has better chances, but still gives the vice president only a 50 percent shot at pulling ahead through a recount. "But I believe that hinges on whether you count the pregnant chads," he said. And Irons says Gore supporters are wrong to assume that the 19 votes he picked up in an initial test hand recount in 1 percent of Palm Beach County precincts can be extrapolated to 1,900 votes for 100 percent of the precincts. "Those were majority, very Democratic precincts," Irons noted, pointing out that less-heavily Democratic areas would not be as likely to follow that projected trend. "You're unsure if that 19 is going to hold for the rest [of the counties]." Judge Charles Burton, chairman of the all-important Palm Beach canvassing board, said the hand count has not shown any appreciable swing either way. "I'm not doing the tally, quite obviously, at this stage, but my general impression is no dramatic swing in the votes," he said. nypostonline.com

To: Math Junkie who wrote (6903)	11/20/2000 11:49:05 AM
From: david james	Respond to of 10042

I do wonder if this is how the campaigns of the future will be run. One side creates a story where they put damaging words into the mouth of the opposing candidate, then at the speed of the internet, that story and the supposed "lies" are spread throughout the media. With the way information moves now, it is just too easy to distort or just plain fake the words of someone, and allow that creation to be spread by the minions hoping to find some weakness in the opposition. washingtonmonthly.com But an examination of dozens of these articles, which purport to detail the chief cases of Gore's exaggerations and lies, finds journalists often engaging in their own exaggerations or even publishing outright falsehoods about Gore. In December, for instance, the news media generated a small tidal wave of stories about Gore's supposed claim that he discovered the Love Canal toxic waste dump. "I was the one that started it all," he was quoted as saying. This "gaffe" then was used to recycle other situations in which Gore allegedly exaggerated his role or, as some writers put it, "lied." But the Love Canal flap started when The Washington Post and The New York Times misquoted Gore on a key point and cropped out the context of another sentence to give readers a false impression of what he meant. The error was then exploited by national Republicans and amplified endlessly by the rest of the news media, even after the Post and Times filed grudging corrections. The Love Canal controversy began on Nov. 30 when Gore was speaking to a group of high school students in Concord, N.H. He was exhorting the students to reject cynicism and to recognize that individual citizens can effect important changes. As an example, he cited a high school girl from Toone, Tenn., a town that had experienced problems with toxic waste. She brought the issue to the attention of Gore's congressional office in the late 1970s. "I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing," Gore told the students. "I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue, and Toone, Tennessee---that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all." ... The Republican National Committee spotted Gore's alleged boast and was quick to fax around its own take. "Al Gore is simply unbelievable---in the most literal sense of that term," declared Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson. "It's a pattern of phoniness---and it would be funny if it weren't also a little scary." The GOP release then doctored Gore's quote a bit more. After all, it would be grammatically incorrect to have said, "I was the one that started it all." So, the Republican handout fixed Gore's grammar to say, "I was the one who started it all." In just one day, the key quote had transformed from "that was the one that started it all" to "I was the one that started it all" to "I was the one who started it all."

To: Math Junkie who wrote (6903)	11/20/2000 12:56:07 PM
From: Solon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10042

Boy, Richard, QWhen you go for a balance, you really go for a balance! This Parry haS written dozens of articles against Bush and the Republicans. Lots of balance there! Here is some more BALANCE. If you dislike Bush and the Republicans this will give ya lots of balance ammunition. Every person needs to make up their own mind as to how much balance they can tolerate. consortiumnews.com