Ames Iowa 2011 Straw Poll: GOP Kiss Of Death, Media Hoax Or Political Necessity?

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Ames is the GOP's Grim Reaper


The Ames Straw Poll is a delightful fraud, an amiable hoax, that most people in Iowa don’t care about, but the national media eat up because the event seems so charmingly “Iowan.”

To its credit, there is no man behind the curtain. Its fraudulence is open and above board: It is organized bribery on a grand scale.

Presidential campaigns buy up large blocks of tickets, hand them out, give Iowans free food, free drinks, free fun rides, free music, free T-shirts and free body-painting to show up at the Hilton Coliseum on the campus of Iowa State University.

All that the people are expected to do in return is listen to speeches by Republican presidential candidates. So you can see why people have to be bribed to show up.

Ideally, people would listen to the speeches and then cast ballots for the Republican of their choice. The term “Straw Poll” comes from the British jurist John Selden (1584-1654), who wrote, “Take a straw and throw it up into the Air – you may see by that which way the Wind is.”

But the Wind at Ames blows. And that is because people can cast their ballots hours before the speeches even begin. The campaigns do not expect people to be swayed by the speeches. They expect that once people are bought, they will stay bought.

But the campaigns do not know Iowans. Iowans are fair-minded and good-hearted, and the Ames Straw Poll, which will be held this Saturday, is good fun to them, not serious politics.

Only the media treat it seriously, and only after writing for weeks and weeks about how meaningless it is.

As The Washington Post put it Tuesday, “The results are not very reliable in predicting who will win the Iowa caucuses, the GOP nomination, or ultimately, the presidency.”

Which is 100 percent correct and which is why about 700 members of the media are expected to show up at Ames on Saturday, why network superstars will be among them and why the press is already doing projected weather reports: 81 degrees, partly cloudy, no locusts.

Why do the media care so much about something that means almost nothing?

Because Ames is a Death Star, that’s why. The media want winners and losers very, very early. They do not want to have to pretend that large numbers of candidates are equally important and equally deserving of coverage or inclusion in debates.

So when the media report who does poorly at Ames, those candidates’ money will dry up, the candidates will drop out and the media will feel justified paying attention to only the top tier. (Unless, of course, some of the top tier wisely choose to skip Ames, which some are doing this year.)

“The Grim Reaper is going to be waiting outside the field house in Ames, Iowa,” Pat Buchanan said in August 1999. “I think it’s going to kill off several people.”

t did, including Buchanan, who came in fourth, and left the Republican Party. “Candor compels us to admit that our vaunted two-party system is a snare and a delusion, a fraud upon the nation,” Buchanan thundered after Ames. “Our two parties have become nothing but two wings on the same bird of prey.”

Wow. Imagine what he would have said if he had come in fifth.

But Ames is capable of surprising, which means surprising the media, since the media are the only people with expectations at this point.

In 2007, Mike Huckabee wowed the crowd by saying, “I can’t buy you, I don’t have the money. I can’t even rent you. The straw poll is not about electing a straw man, but giving the people of Iowa a chance to prove they are mature voters and savvy. They are buying the cereal, not just the box.”

Huckabee lost, of course. Mitt Romney had bought many more voters at Ames that year. In fact, Huckabee, while coming in second, didn’t even come in a close second. Romney got 31.5 percent of the vote and Huckabee 18.1 percent.

But Huckabee was savvy enough to write the reporters’ stories for them. “For me to come in second is the story,” Huckabee told the press when the tally was announced. “For me to hold the front-runner under 50 percent is the story.”

And so it became the story. And Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses and the nomination of his party and became the 44th president of the United States. No. Wait. Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses, but lost the nomination to John McCain, who lost the presidency to Barack Obama, who now wonders why he wanted the job in the first place.

So you can see how important straw polls are.

The Democratic Party bans straw polls, dismissing them as a waste of time and money. I have always suspected the party actually bans them, however, because Democrats are afraid they might hold a political event where fun might break out.

In the past, Ames has featured indoor fireworks, Jack Kemp throwing mini-footballs to the crowd, Pat Robertson supporters wearing revolving red lights on their heads and what Americans love most: shopping. In 1999, the best-selling item was a postcard depicting Hillary Clinton in a black leather bra spanking a nude President Bill Clinton who was sprawled across her lap and smiling.

Ames is a spectacle in a spectacle-driven political process. It will be covered live and analyzed live. Ames tells you much more about the media than about the candidates, which is a good thing.

It means we are keeping our priorities straight.


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Sources: CNN, Huffington Post, MSNBC, Newsweek, NY Times, Politico, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google Maps

Where's Al Gore? Iceland's Volcano & China's Quake, Apocalypse Or Climate Change?

Where's Al Gore??

Earthquakes in Chile, China & Haiti, the Worse U.S. Winter in decades, Tsunamis in Hawaii & Taiwan and now Iceland's Volcanic Eruptions all in less than a year's time.

Are these regular "Natural Disasters", signs of "Climate Change" or "End of the World" warnings to Mankind?

Its definitely something to think about.

By the way has anyone seen Al Gore lately?

Perhaps he can enlighten us as to what's happening with this weird weather.

Check out the videos and article about these catastrophes below.

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Europe Faces More Air Travel Chaos


Thick drifts of volcanic ash blanketed parts of rural Iceland on Friday as a vast, invisible plume of grit drifted over Europe, emptying the skies of planes and sending hundreds of thousands in search of hotel rooms, train tickets or rental cars.

Polish officials worried that the ash cloud could threaten the arrival of world leaders for Sunday's state funeral for President Lech Kaczynski and his wife, Maria, in the southern city of Krakow.

So far, President Barack Obama, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are among those coming and no one has canceled. Kaczynski's family insisted Friday they wanted the funeral to go forward as planned but there was no denying the ash cloud was moving south and east.

The air traffic agency Eurocontrol said almost two-thirds of Europe's flights were canceled Friday, as air space remained largely closed in Britain and across large chunks of north and central Europe.

"The skies are totally empty over northern Europe," said Brian Flynn, deputy head of Eurocontrol, adding "there will be some significant disruption of European air traffic tomorrow."

Air travel grounded

The agency said about 16,000 of Europe's usual 28,000 daily flights were canceled Friday — twice as many as were canceled a day earlier. Only about 120 trans-Atlantic flights reached European airports compared to 300 on a normal day, and about 60 flights between Asia and Europe were canceled.

The International Air Transport Association said the volcano was costing the industry at least $200 million a day.

Southern Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull glacier began erupting for the second time in a month on Wednesday, sending ash several miles into the air. Winds pushed the plume south and east across Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia and into the heart of Europe.

Gray ash settled in drifts near the glacier, swirling in the air and turning day into night. Authorities told people in the area with respiratory problems to stay indoors, and advised everyone to wear masks and protective goggles outside.

In major European cities, travel chaos reigned. Extra trains were put on in Amsterdam and lines to buy train tickets were so long that the rail company handed out free coffee.

Train operator Eurostar said it was carrying almost 50,000 passengers between London, Paris and Brussels. Thalys, a high-speed venture of the French, Belgian and German rail companies, was allowing passengers to buy tickets even if trains were fully booked.

London taxi company Addison Lee said it had received requests for journeys to cities as far away as Paris, Milan, Amsterdam and Zurich.

The disruptions hit tourists, business travelers and dignitaries alike.

Germany's Merkel had to go to Portugal rather than Berlin as she flew home from a U.S. visit. Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg managed to get a flight to Madrid from New York but was still not sure when or how he would get back home.

Shift in tactics

The military also had to adjust. Five German soldiers wounded in Afghanistan were diverted to Turkey instead of Germany, while U.S. medical evacuations for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are being flown directly from the warfronts to Washington rather than to a care facility in Germany. The U.S. military has also stopped using temporarily closed air bases in the U.K. and Germany.

Aviation experts said it was among the worst disruptions Europe has ever seen.

"We don't have many volcanoes in Europe," said David Learmount of Flight International, an aviation publication. "The wind was blowing in the wrong direction."

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Ice, fire

In Iceland, torrents of water carried away chunks of ice the size of small houses on Thursday as hot gases melted the glacier over the volcano. Sections of the country's main ring road were wiped out by the flash floods.

More floods from melting waters are expected as long as the volcano keeps erupting — and in 1821, the same volcano managed to erupt for more than a year.

Small amounts of ash settled in northern Scotland and Norway, but officials said it posed little threat to health.

But Europeans were urged to stay indoors if ash started to rain down from the sky, the World Health Organization said on Friday. WHO spokesman David Epstein said the microscopic ash was potentially dangerous for people if it started to "settle" on the earth because inhaled particles can reach the lungs and cause respiratory problems.

The ash cloud, drifting between 20,000 to 30,000 feet high and invisible from the ground, initially blocked the main air flight path between the U.S. east coast and Europe. On Friday, the cloud's trajectory was taking it over northern France and Austria and into eastern and central Russia at about 25 mph.

Fearing that microscopic particles of highly abrasive ash could endanger passengers by causing aircraft engines to fail, authorities shut down air space over Britain, Ireland, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Belgium. That halted flights at Europe's two busiest airports — Heathrow in London and Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris — as well as dozens of other airports, 25 in France alone.

Air space restrictions were lifted, imposed or extended Friday as the cloud moved.

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Flights were suspended at Frankfurt airport, Europe's third-busiest terminal, and at other German airports including Duesseldorf, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Cologne.

Irish aviation authorities reopened airports in Dublin and Cork and France allowed some planes to land in Paris. Sweden and Norway declared skies in the far north to be safe but kept a lockdown on flights to both capitals — Stockholm and Oslo.

Britain's National Air Traffic Service said the air over England would remain closed to flights until at least 7 a.m. (0600 GMT, 2 a.m. EDT) Saturday, although some flights were being allowed in Northern Ireland and Scotland.

Switzerland, Slovakia, Croatia and Hungary closed their airspace, and Poland expanded its no-fly zone to most of the country, excluding Krakow. Belgium extended its flight restrictions until late Saturday morning.

Iceland, a nation of 320,000 people, sits on a large volcanic hot spot in the Atlantic's mid-oceanic ridge and has a history of devastating eruptions. One of the worst was the 1783 eruption of the Laki volcano, which spewed a toxic cloud over Europe, killing tens of thousands.


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Sources: CBS News, CNN, Digital Art, Freaking News, MSNBC, Youtube, Google Maps

The Internet Crashed! Its Doomsday! How Will You Survive??

Pres. Obama on Cyber Security. Obama stages fight in Cyber War. NBC's Tracie Potts reports.

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What if the Internet breaks?


The 40-year-old system might be vulnerable to technical collapse and cyberattack, which could cause widespread chaos in fields from banking to health care to government.

When your Internet service goes down, it's at best an inconvenience. If you rely on it for business, it can quickly cost you money.

So imagine: What happens if the Internet breaks?

Picture people wandering the streets lost without GPS or maps on their iPhones, unable to pay for food or other goods with a simple swipe of a card.

Companies would have to resort to faxes and phone calls instead of e-mail; they'd quickly reach capacity and be unable to function. Credit cards wouldn't work; stores and hospitals would run short of supplies. Even electrical power to our homes could be disrupted.

"It would be a mess," said Dave Marcus, the director of security research for McAfee (MFE, news, msgs). "You would be taking businesses that were designed to do all their point-of-sale and financial transactions through the Internet and going back to pen and paper and taking checks in a car to the bank. People would lose their minds."

On the 40th anniversary of the first transmission over the earliest version of the Internet, it's more than an idle question to examine the network's fragility. It's been more than 20 years since the last systemwide overhaul, and Internet infrastructure is still based on 1970s ideas about computer networks.

Headline-making outages of popular Web sites such as YouTube and Twitter merely hint at the damage a full-blown failure could wreak. The Internet protocols that allow computers to communicate in networks have infiltrated every sector of our economy.

"The Internet has moved from being a toy or ornament to something that's central to our economy," said James Lewis, a senior fellow at CSIS, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C. "We've automated all these processes, which makes our economy much more efficient, which means cheap. But it also means we're now dependent."

How could the Internet break?

The obvious question is, could it happen? In fact, parts of the Internet go down quite frequently.

The outages that make headlines usually involve a large segment going down, either cutting service to a geographical area or taking down a given Web site. For instance, Michael Jackson's death sent people flooding to sites such as Google News and Twitter, rendering each temporarily inaccessible. A few years ago, Pakistan's attempt to block access to YouTube in that country resulted in a two-hour outage of YouTube across the world. And early this year, hackers kicked the entire nation of Kyrgyzstan off the Internet.

Those examples highlight the two main risks: an attack or a technical collapse.

A systemwide outage is hard to envision, though. The Internet is a decentralized system of routers and networks owned by a variety of governmental and private organizations. That makes it resilient: If one section breaks, the network calculates a route around the disruption.

The Internet opened for business in 1969, when a government project connected scientists, researchers and military officials by networking giant mainframes. In the early 1990s, the government opened the Internet to commercial development. In 1994, Netscape launched its browser, the first of an ever-increasing cascade of user-friendly software and applications for public consumption.

To bring down the entire Internet, something or someone would probably have to disrupt the core Internet protocols -- the rules that computers follow when trying to communicate with other computers. That would not only break the World Wide Web but also private IP networks that companies maintain for greater security.

One possible avenue would be to attack the domain name system, or DNS, that identifies the address of each computer or device attached to an IP network. Currently, just more than a dozen computers scattered around the world contain the DNS addressing information for the entire Internet, Lewis said.

If someone were able to erase or scramble that information, your computer wouldn't know where to find the information on a given Web page or where to deliver an e-mail. But all that information is duplicated on each of the central servers.

That redundancy is probably the Internet's best defense. The Internet was designed on the premise that computers are smart but the network is fallible, even when the computer operators attached to it were all highly educated academics. These days, of course, those 30,000 experts have been succeeded by 1.5 billion untrained people connecting computers, iPods, BlackBerrys, televisions and other devices.

Simply staying ahead of the demand for DNS addresses and server capacity is a challenge. VeriSign receives 50 billion queries each day from computers looking for DNS data and expects that to rise to 4 trillion by 2020, according to Ken Silva, the company's chief technology officer.

Part of the debate in Washington over so-called net neutrality involves who would pay for billions in upgrades to enable the Internet to handle the demand of uses such as high-definition video. Experts at AT&T and elsewhere have suggested the Net could run out of capacity next year. The point is hotly debated, and it's not clear what would happen if it did.

The Doomsday scenario:

If the Internet did break, the impact would ripple through to:

* Communications. You wouldn't be able to get information from e-mail or the Web. Phone and television services that rely on IP networking would go dark. News organizations would be unable to communicate internally or to use the Web to gather and disseminate news. Governments would have trouble communicating internally and broadcasting emergency information.

* Financial transactions. Banks process payments electronically over IP networks, whether by the swipe of a credit card or the check you send from your bank's Web site. They do have backup systems, relying on physical checks and phone networks, but those require human staffing and would struggle to keep up with demand.

* Transportation. Airplanes, trains and even some roads rely on IP networks to ensure smooth transportation. Much travel would grind to a near standstill, disrupting the movement of people and goods around the country.

* Retail supply chain. Even those trucks and shipping avenues that work would be taken back to the dark ages, since retail stores wouldn't be able to use automated inventory systems. At Wal-Mart, for instance, when an item is swiped for sale, the cashier's machine sends a signal to a central computer database that a new product is needed in that location. A Wal-Mart Stores (WMT, news, msgs) spokeswoman declined to comment.

* Health care. Many of our medical records are stored on computer databases. With networks down, a health care provider would have to be standing in front of the relevant computer in order to access a record. Pharmacies, hospitals and clinics would have trouble accessing records and keeping supplies in stock.

* Electricity grid. You wouldn't lose power automatically if the Internet broke, but energy companies would be unable to send control signals around the grid. "That network becomes a potential point of failure," VeriSign's Silva said.

"If the Internet stopped working, every major corporation and government agency would not be able to function," said Tom Kellermann, a vice president at Core Security Technologies.

Efforts to protect the Internet

Don't run off to stock the fallout shelter, though. Many measures are in place to prevent a catastrophic failure.

"There are so many redundancies built into the Internet protocol and the architecture," McAfee's Marcus said. "The actual root servers of the DNS are not approachable by most computers."

At VeriSign, which oversees Web sites ending in ".com," 75 duplicate servers contain the same answers for computers that query the database for DNS data. VeriSign uses multiple operating systems, computers from different manufacturers and redundant routers to ensure that a bad chip or operating system vulnerability doesn't become a single point of failure. The master database also checks data before sending it out on the network to make sure any corruption isn't propagated.

"We attempt to make sure we are over-provisioned enough to not only deal with the demand in load but the demand in threats," Silva said. "If companies don't invest in infrastructure, they will pay a price for it eventually."

The government requires financial companies to maintain backup systems to ensure the smooth functioning of the system, said Scott Talbott, a senior vice president at The Financial Services Roundtable, which represents banks, insurance companies, mutual funds and securities firms.

"Financial institutions, like all major users of the Net, maintain and test contingency plans for a wide range of scenarios, including Net capacity issues, outages, routing complications and browser problems," Talbott said. "These plans are designed to keep all critical functions up and running, and to keep service levels as high as possible.

"If computer systems shut down, banks would have backup systems, and those legacy systems would cut in. Depending on the length of delay, there may be an inconvenience to the customer and a slowing of the transactions."

But while the lack of a central Internet authority deprives bad actors of a single target to bring down the Net, it also means there's no single organization that can order new security or protocols.

"The people who are managing the system work really hard to keep it stable. Our problem is that these Internet protocols are from the '70s," said Lewis, of the CSIS think tank. "You can polish it and keep it tuned up, but it's still a 1970s car. We know there are people in the world who are trying to figure out, 'How can I bring this thing down?'"

Even criminals need the Net

Perhaps the most reassuring argument against the threat of attack is that even the people who have the skill and motivation to carry one out -- rogue governments, terrorists or criminals -- are dependent on it.

"The bad guys really have no interest," said Marcus Sachs, the director of the SANS Internet Storm Center, an all-volunteer Internet early-warning organization. "It's not to their benefit to monkey around with the wires and the switches because they too are reliant on the Internet for communication and to steal things. It's kind of like a bank robber who would blow up the bridge next to the bank."

The major crime syndicates of the world derive 60% of their revenue from cybercrime, and each has a business unit solely devoted to hacking. "They don't want to burn down the castle; they want to take it over. They want to pillage it slowly," Core Security Technologies' Kellermann said. "It's not about breaking the Internet; it's about controlling the Internet. It's about maintaining a consistent, clandestine presence."

Likewise, terrorists use the Internet to recruit new members, disseminate propaganda, move money and communicate. Moreover, McAfee's Marcus noted: "How can you see the terror you're supposed to be inspiring in others if you can't access the Internet?"




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