(Via Glyn Moody.) Can’t find a credit for the illustration, alas.
Daily Archives: November 20, 2009
Majority Of Republicans Think Obama Didn’t Actually Win 2008 Election
Wow! There are more nutters in the US than even I had supposed. According to this report,
The new national poll from Public Policy Polling (D) has an astonishing number about paranoia among the GOP base: Republicans do not think President Obama actually won the 2008 election — instead, ACORN stole it.
This number goes a long way towards explaining the anger of the Tea Party crowd. They not only think Obama’s agenda is against America, but they don’t think he was actually the choice of the American people at all! Interestingly, NY-23 Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman is now accusing ACORN of stealing his race, and Fox News personalities have often speculated about ACORN stealing the 2008 Minnesota Senate race for Al Franken.
The poll asked this question: “Do you think that Barack Obama legitimately won the Presidential election last year, or do you think that ACORN stole it for him?” The overall top-line is legitimately won 62%, ACORN stole it 26%.
Among Republicans, however, only 27% say Obama actually won the race, with 52% — an outright majority — saying that ACORN stole it, and 21% are undecided. Among McCain voters, the breakdown is 31%-49%-20%. By comparison, independents weigh in at 72%-18%-10%, and Democrats are 86%-9%-4%.
Now, the obvious comparison would be that many Democrats felt that George W. Bush didn’t legitimately win the 2000 election. But there are some clear differences.
First of all, Al Gore empirically won the national popular vote in 2000, and lost in a disputed recount process in Florida. By comparison, John McCain lost the national popular vote by a 53%-46% margin.
In order to believe that Obama wasn’t the true winner of the 2008 election, one would have to think that ACORN (and perhaps other groups) stuffed ballots to the tune of over 9.5 million votes, Obama’s national margin.
What’s 26 per cent of 200 million? And this is a country with nuclear weapons.
Apple’s Mistake
Paul Graham is a terrific, perceptive essayist. (If you haven’t read his collection Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age: Essays on the Art of Programming
His latest essay on how Apple is treating the programmers who develop Apps for the iPhone/iTouch is characteristically acute.
This is how it opens:
I don’t think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don’t think they realize how much it matters that it’s broken.
The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they’ve ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.
How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that’s just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak…
Take a break. Grab a coffee. And read the whole piece.
The only way to break Apple’s stranglehold on the Apps business is to find a way of making the Android platform attractive to developers. The problem is — as Graham points out — that most geeks have iPhones and we know from long experience that the best software comes from programmers “scratching an itch” (as Eric Raymond put it). So maybe an intelligent strategy would be for Google (or Motorola or other handset manufacturers who aim to offer Android phones) to identify developers and offer them free Android phones.