www.electoral-vote.com/info/votemaster-faq.html
The Votemaster FAQ Many people have asked who am I, what my qualifications are, and why am I doing this. People have speculated that I am a Clinton administration o fficial, a bored retired statistician and more. I am a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universitei t in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Most of you have never heard of me but in an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny corner of the universe I have done enough stuff that Google has somehow managed to dig up 10,000 pages referring t o me. When I am not collecting data, analyzing it, or blogging, my day job is d oing the kind of stuff professors at major research universities normall y do. The best part is working with young people, especially my graduate students. To answer the question of why I am in The Netherlands, my lovely wife is Dutch and long ago we decided that she couldn't do her kind of work in t he US whereas I could work anywhere. I visit the US several times a year and am thoroughly familiar what is going on there. I also read the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post on-line e very day, as well as numerous political websites and blogs. I grew up in Westchester County, just north of New York City, a Republica n bastion and then the 5th wealthiest county in the country. I cut my political teeth in California on the 1968 presidential election. I was also a lobbyist for the Sierra Club, buttonholing Calif ornia state senators and assemblymen, trying to get them to vote for a b ill that would protect San Francisco Bay. The bill was enacted into the law that created the BCDC and saved the Bay. The Democratic Party regards the 7 million over seas Americans as the 51st state and allows them to send delegates to th e DNC. I joined Democrats Abroad (DA) and tried to become a delegate. DA uses the famous Iowa caucus system to choose its delegates. I cleared t he first hurdle and was elected as a delegate to the World Democrats Abr oad caucus in Edinburgh this past March. Nearly 200 elected delegates fr om as far away as Australia came (at their own expense) for a three-day caucus. We began by pledging allegiance to a huge American flag in the h all. Then we went on to write our platform, elect delegates to the DNC, and make plans for the coming months. Unfortunately, DA gets to send onl y 9 delegates to the DNC (vs. Although I majored in phys ics, I took quite a few math and statistics courses as an undergraduate and in grad school.
books, which h ave gone through a total of 14 editions and been translated into 22 lang uages. I have also published well over 100 articles in scholarly journal s and conferences. Furthermore, I wrote a humorous/satirical travel book (vaguely similar in tone to those of Paul Theroux), but have never quit e got around to finding a publisher. In a nutshell, because living abroad I know first hand what the world thi nks of America and it is not a pretty picture at the moment. I want peop le to think of America as the land of freedom and democracy, not the lan d of arrogance and blind revenge. T he US media do a spectacularly bad job of informing Americans about wh at is going on in rest of the world. The invasion of Afghani stan was seen as completely justified. After all, the Al-Qaida leadershi p had to be decapitated. Bush, Cheney, and Powell said they had conclusive proof that Saddam had WMD and could attack at any i nstant. We now know there were no WMD There weren't even factories or labs to produce them. Saddam was an evil dict ator with evil fantasies but he was no threat to America. Yet former Tre asury Secretary Paul O'Neill said that the planning to invade Iraq began the day Bush was inaugurated. When I was in elementary school, the schoo l was plagued by a bully. He was the biggest, strongest kid around and w ould beat up anyone he didn't like. We were all exceedingly polite to hi s face, but hated his guts behind his back. One day he was chasing some poor kid and he tripped and skidded a considerable distance, scraping hi s face on the rough asphalt of the playground. The world sees him--a nd by inference, America--as arrogant, self-centered, and mean. I spoke to Americans from dozens of countries at the DA caucus. When talking to foreigners, I can tell them about the Bill of Rights or freedom or World War II, or whate ver I want, but all they see is this big, stupid, arrogant, playground b ully and a stolen election in Florida last time. I want America to be respected in the world again, and John Ke rry can restore the respect America deserves.
column by Charlie Brooker last week ending with this paragaph: "On November 2, the entire civilised world wi ll be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. Maybe Brooker i s a nut and maybe it was a joke, but the fact that a serious newspaper w ould publish this piece shows how deep the hatred of George Bush runs. Imagine what people in Spain or Ind onesia or the Arab world think. Now you might be thinking: Who the hell cares if America is the world's p ariah, along with, say, North Korea and Zimbabwe? Well, I care, for one, and I think most Americans want to be respected for being a democracy r ather than simply being feared because we have more nuclear weapons than anybody else. You can't make the world love you by running commercials full of snarling wolves on worldwide TV. But there are some practical matters to consider as well.
The Globe and Mail, you get a picture not color ed by partisan electoral considerations. You sometimes wonder if they ar e reporting the same war as the US media. Over 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the war , mostly women and children. Well over 1000 American soldiers--many of t hem just kids who signed up for the National Guard and never expected to go to war--have been killed there and thousands more have been maimed f or life. Americans are being killed daily in increasing numbers and unle ss there is a radical change, this will go on for years. Reenlistment ra tes are way down and manpower needs are way up. With a President Kerry, there is hope that other countries might contribute serious numbers of t roops to help stabilize Iraq. With a second Bush administration they wil l just say: "You broke it, you fix it." If other countries won't help out, Bush is going to be faced with an unpl easant choice: accept another Vietnam-type quagmire lasting for years or reinstitute the draft. There is no way we can win in Iraq with current troop levels. And it is an open secret that after the election, Bush is going to ask Congr ess for another $70 billion down payment on Iraq. In addition, the US needs the help of other countries to gather intelli gence about terrorists, cut off their funding, and track them down. Trou ble is, when the playground bully comes asking for help, everyone just w alks away. A new president who shows respect for the world instead of ar rogance will get a lot more help. The banner ads I ran until October were linked to several different voter registration we bsites. Thousands upon thousan ds of new overseas voters registered, most of whom are confronted daily by what people in other countries think of the US A second goal was to present the polling data honestly and without spin. The media seem obse ssed with the national polls, but it is the electoral college that matte rs. The cartoons are largely anti-Bush, but the data are honest.
But despite the pro-Bush slant, I believe hi s numbers are also honest. In fact, there have been times when I showed Bush slightly ahead and he showed Kerry slightly ahead. To make it crystal clear, this Website is my personal projec t I paid for it myself and did all the work myself except as noted in t he Acknowledgements section on the Welcome page. com, a commercial Web hosting company in upstate New York, and I pai d their standard commercial rate. The Democratic Party and Democrats Abr oad didn't even know about me. In fact, unless they happen to see this p age, they probably still don't know. No 527 or other group had anything to do with it at all. This site is now one of the top 1 000 Websites ...
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