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By now the various ways in which the lamestream media understate the impact of and support for Ron Paul are legion. A good deal has been made in a recent critique of an AOL poll with regard to Dr. Paul’s views about the Civil War. The controversy is over a poll conducted by AOL after Dr. Paul’s appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press last Sunday and the way AOL has allegedly doctored the results.

That poll centered around remarks made by Dr. Paul concerning Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. I would argue that his remarks were taken out of context to paint Dr. Paul in a bad light; although not as blatantly as remarks made recently by Will Smith were twisted by certain blogs. In any case, the question was loaded so the poll can’t be accurate with respect to “agreeing” with Dr. Paul. The topic was raised by Tim Russert on Meet the Press and Dr. Paul handled it quite well if you read his remarks in context.

Whether or not AOL subsequently doctored the numbers to cover up the fact that more people agreed with Dr. Paul is secondary. Of greater significance is why they chose to key on a question concerning events that happened over 140 years ago rather than the other 20+ minutes of the interview which dealt with current issues. In my opinion they are grasping at straws in an effort to paint Dr. Paul as racist.

Lamesteam media in drag
AOL is owned by Time-Warner, one of the lamestream media’s largest corporations, and therefore it will always distort information about Ron Paul. The various ways they did so in the case of the Civil War poll are somewhat subjective and/or hard to prove.

I’d like to provide an example of how they have understated support for Dr. Paul in a manner that, while somewhat subtle, is undeniable. Actually, what they did was to overstate the support for his Republican rivals. I would further allege that one purpose of the Civil War poll is to draw attention away from another AOL poll that asked people which candidate they support for President. Ron Paul won that poll handily, but AOL is doing what it can to bury that fact.

Viagra™ for the also rans
Here is a screenshot of that poll’s results as of this morning (December 28):

What’s wrong with this picture?

As you can see, a quick glance at the AOL chart would give the impression that Ron Paul merely nudged out most of his rivals. However, the bars aren’t drawn to their correct scale. This is all the more egregious since the poll itself directs participants to see how well their candidate is doing compared to the others. Participants will get a better picture by simply noting the complexion of the U.S. map. The 45 states in Ron Paul’s olive green say a great deal despite AOl’s efforts to downplay the obvious. This map is a textbook example of the concept of broad support.

I’ve created my own, much less fancy chart to illustrate how AOL overstated the results of Ron Paul’s rivals by making their bars larger than they should be:

A look at my chart provides an accurate view of the relative support for the candidates. When you combine the accurate bars with the color of the map you will understand how thoroughly Ron Paul owned this poll. AOL doesn’t even have the integrity to place a disclaimer at the bottom of their chart stating that the bars aren’t drawn to the correct scale.

But then, you knew that, right? Well, at any rate this blog must be pretty good. I checked out a web site called “What’s my Blog Rated?” that purports to rate blog sites along the lines of movie ratings. Okay, I’ll bite. Who wouldn’t want a rating for their blog? Here is the result:

So, I suggest that PG= “Pretty Good” . Even if that isn’t really what the movie rating, or blog rating people had in mind. What I really find interesting is how the rater determined that my site is “Pretty Good” instead of just plain “G”, or “Good”. Apparently talking about torture, guns and drugs isn’t acceptable in polite circles. Even if, as in the case of my blog, torture is considered abhorrent, guns are considered essential in protecting oneself against evil, and the drug war is merely mentioned in passing.

That’s okay, I can live with my “PG” rating even if I might quibble about how I came to earn it. That is, as long as the rating is unofficial and not to be used to filter me out of web searches and such. It’s actually what I would rate it myself, even without counting the occurrences of supposedly objectionable words.

After all, I ain’t no Mary Poppins, although I do try to watch my manners and language in my writing. I assume that my audience, however tiny, is composed of adults who don’t mind reading about things that I consider to be of importance to grown-ups. I don’t think that’s assuming too much.

Meet Miguel. He’s got balls!

Web sites come and web sites go, but with a little effort you can pull an old one out and show it off. Kind of like a grand parent’s brag book I suppose. Where were you when Republicans were touting a Revolution instead of trying to quash one?

Today I tackled a little project I’ve been meaning to for a long time. What finally got me moving was the addition of an extension to my Firefox web browser called ScrapBook which gives me the ability to download an entire web page, or web site, to my computer. One may find many reasons for saving a copy of a web site, but my motivation was to try and correct a terrible oversight on my part many years ago. I simply forgot to keep copies (or I subsequently lost my copies) of web sites I authored in the 1990s.

Fortunately, the world wide web has a pretty good memory and considerably better facilities for remembering ancient web sites than I do. (Hey, 1995 is virtually Iron Age, web-wise.) So, after installing my nifty new browser extension, I headed over to The Wayback Machine and recovered a copy of my first web site. After a bit of reworking the links and code in my old pages I was able to reconstruct my initial contribution to the World Wide Web; such as it is. While www.nguworld.com may no longer exist as a working domain, its content now lives on here at www.golfront.org, pretty much exactly as it looked in 1995.

This is as it should be, as you’ll see if you check it out. It was that content that eventually inspired my current domain name. It also inspired a little enmity from the targets of my ire at the time. I offer no apology though, even after more than a decade. Quite the contrary, they deserved it and I’m proud of the barbs I tossed, even if the presentation seems primitive by current standards. I just hope that I can bring golfront.org up to the standard of the ideas that inspired it.

This silly commercial is just too funny not to share. I think they should give some credit to the movie A Fish Called Wanda though. I remember my dad busting a gut over a similar scene in that movie. I wish he were here to enjoy this too.