Marcus Adams

Down to the Wire: Scott Brown Up 4 In New Poll

Fri, 01/15/2010 - 12:41pm | posted by Marcus Adams

A new Suffolk University poll just released has Scott Brown leading Martha Coakley for the open Massachusetts Senate seat 50-46 with a 4.4 percent margin of error. Highlights of this poll confirm Brown’s strong popularity with independents and high favorability ratings. Furthermore, Scott Brown has been raising unprecedented amounts of money in small donations online as Monday’s goal of raising $500,000 was obliterated with a haul of over $1.3 million dollars.

H/T: RedState

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NY-23: It’s Over

Mon, 11/23/2009 - 11:07am | posted by Marcus Adams

The Watertown Daily Times is reporting that Bill Owens has a lead in the absentee ballots and cannot be defeated with the remaining votes to be counted.

But this is not before some nasty voter fraud involving planting a virus in some voting machines. Needless to say this needs to be investigated and prosecuted, but do you have any faith in the Obama DOJ doing so?

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NY-23 May Flip due to Tabulation Error, Absentees

Fri, 11/13/2009 - 11:15am | posted by Marcus Adams

There is news from New York indicating that Bill Owens may lose his seat in the House after the correction of an error in the Oswego county returns added about 1,200 votes to Doug Hoffman’s vote total.

Owens now leads by 3,026 votes, 66,698 to 63,672.

It is believed there are a sufficient amount of uncounted absentee ballots (approximately 10,000 were sent out) that could still affect the outcome of this race. New York election law states that absentee ballots received by November 16th and postmarked by November 2nd will count in this special election.

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The Price of Being Apolitical

Fri, 10/30/2009 - 9:51am | posted by Marcus Adams

“An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile hoping it will eat him last.” - Winston Churchill

Recently, I’ve taken some time to think about what many of my friends have said about being apolitical. From what I can tell, they are so frustrated by the heated way that people of a partisan bent go after each other they want to drop out of the discussion entirely. Previously, when people had a disagreement on something they either tried to find common ground or chose to disagree respectfully. Never did it become personal—until recently.

To be sure, many people of good faith can state their views without ruining friendships or coming to blows. But their numbers are shrinking as the political issues of the day hit home and the anger starts to build.

Why then does this growing incivility matter? It should matter to you because your freedoms are being taken away from you by opportunistic politicians who thrive on anger—your anger. This particular group of politicians feels safe in the knowledge they’ll be sent back to congress regardless of what you think of their actions.

Those feelings are well justified: as history proves, if a politician wins once odds are good they’ll win again. And because of this, they don’t fear you because they won’t be voted out. This only makes matters worse for those who have been silenced because of their distaste for the vigorous, sometimes personal debate that passes for American politics.

Take a look at these charts from the Center for Responsive Politics:

Explaining Net Neutrality: Is it a Fairness Doctrine for the Internet?

Tue, 10/27/2009 - 10:03am | posted by Marcus Adams

Net neutrality is one of the newest buzzwords around the internet and is starting to gain attention of many computer users.

So, what is net neutrality? Before I answer that question, we need to first understand how the process of getting online works. When you subscribe to a cable or DSL connection, most people believe that you are buying a direct connection to the internet. However, this is not true in that your provider serves as your go-between to all of the servers and bandwidth that makes that connection. For that reason, your provider could (and does, to an extent) control what you can and cannot “see” and do on the internet because they have purchased and allocated bandwidth on your behalf.

Recently, various internet service providers such as Comcast and AT&T have started to suggest that they should begin to charge you for access to the most popular sites and services and this is where net neutrality comes into play. From your provider’s perspective, net neutrality is bad for business because they buy their bandwidth based on capacity–the more they need, the more it costs them.

Here’s an example: YouTube is by far the most popular site for watching and sharing videos. However, video on the internet requires a great deal of data to be transferred from one location to another. In response, the providers would like to start charging you for accessing those bandwidth heavy websites thereby reducing the load (and cost) of the bandwidth they provide and increasing their profits.

If these new fees were to be allowed under rules that could be proposed, issues of censorship arise where as a user you would be forced to pay for content you previously could access for free or lose access to that content. In addition, your provider would have the power to cut off access to sites not deemed cost effective or for any reason they feel appropriate.