Why were the polls so wrong about Ms Clinton?

http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/73/71201.html
1/08 - Diebold Accuvote op-scan ...
Why is firmware dated 99-3-14 being used in a 2008 election?
There are bags of security flaws with the system as a whole, including: the regulatory body looking at the development of the machine, the decision to allow these machines to be taken home, and poor software leaving it vulnerable to the hacks. Inside access to the machines, spoiled ballots, trusting the developer, these are all massive security issues.
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NEW HAMPSHIRE: This voting machine is counting 81% of the votes Jan. 8, 2008 in the presidential primary.

A sole source private contractor run by John Silvestro has inside access to the chips (maintenance, repairs, tech support) and programs the memory cards.

[This doesn't pass the smell test the clinton stench is famous for.] Clinton 39% Obama 36%. A 3% difference. Just a little maniplation of the Clinton vote could have given her the 3% margin. It does seem the voting machines they are using have big software hacking flaws. Given the "is""is" way of doing things with the clintons the voting in New Hampshire could have very well been (depending on what "is""is" means a clinton stolen election) The smell is all the polls had her losing to Obama and even the focus groups. I believe the clinton's will fail the smell test over and over again until she gets to stinking too much and "is""is" true meaning is revealed in the form of clinton losing the nomination. There will be no tears shed by Ms clinton for voter fraud only denial of any knowledge of anything.

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New Hampshire's Polling Fiasco

January 09, 2008 12:05 AM (ABC NEWS)

There will be a serious, critical look at the final pre-election polls in the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire; that is essential. It is simply unprecedented for so many polls to have been so wrong. We need to know why.

But we need to know it through careful, empirically based analysis. There will be a lot of claims about what happened - about respondents who reputedly lied, about alleged difficulties polling in biracial contests. That may be so. It also may be a smokescreen - a convenient foil for pollsters who'd rather fault their respondents than own up to other possibilities - such as their own failings in sampling and likely voter modeling.

There have been previous races that misstated support for black candidates in biracial races. But most of those were long ago, and there have been plenty of polls in biracial races that were accurate. (For more on past problems with polls in biracial races, see this blog I wrote for Freakonomics last May.) And there was no overstatement of Obama in Iowa polls.

On the other hand, the pre-election polls in the New Hampshire Republican race were accurate. The problem was isolated to the Democratic side - where, it should be noted, we have not just one groundbreaking candidate in Barack Obama, but also another, in Hillary Clinton.

A starting point for this analysis will be to look at every significant Democratic subgroup in the New Hampshire pre-election polls, and see how those polls did in estimating the size of those groups and their vote choices. The polls' estimates of turnout overall will be relevant as well.

In the end there may be no smoking gun. Those polls may have been accurate, but done in by a superior get-out-the-vote effort, or by very late deciders whose motivations may or may not ever be known. They may have been inaccurate because of bad modeling, compromised sampling, or simply an overabundance of enthusiasm for Obama on the heels of his Iowa victory that led his would-be supporters to overstate their propensity to turn out. (A function, perhaps, of youth.)

Prof. Jon Krosnick of Stanford University has another argument: That the order of names on the New Hampshire ballot - in which, by random draw, Clinton was toward the top, Obama at the bottom - netted her about 3 percentage points more than she'd have gotten otherwise. That's not enough to explain the gap in some of the polls, which presumably randomized candidate names, but it might hold part of the answer.

The data may tell us; it may not. What's beyond question is that it is incumbent on us - and particularly on the producers of the New Hampshire pre-election polls - to look at the data, and to look closely, and to do it without prejudging.

http://www.squelchhillery.com/hillery_campaign_theme.mp3
http://squelchhillary.com/
http://emptysuit.org/

Reality is sinking in Ms hillary

The pressure of Obama's surge at the polls may be too much for Clinton as she choked back tears during a campaign event in New Hampshire.

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — One-time presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton was driven to the verge of tears at a campaign event during the final hours before New Hampshire voters go to the polls Tuesday.

The pressure of a surge by Barack Obama may be overwhelming Clinton as she choked up Monday unexpectedly when answering a question about how she keeps up the pace on the campaign trail.

“I have so many opportunities and don’t want us to fall backwards,” she said. “I see what’s happening, people. … Some of us are ready some of us are not. When we look at the array of problems and potential for it to spin out of control, this is one of the most important elections. As tired as I am … I believe so strongly (in) who we are as a nation so I’ll do everything I can to make my case and voters get to decide.”

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Lets see what she said. The first sentence is just fluff. 2nd sentence starting to think about the fact she is being rejected. 3rd sentence is fluff. 4th sentence is fluff. 5th sentence she is looking for sympathy. All a bunch of witch brew for you.

Is Hillary becomming a Sourpuss?

sour·puss /ˈsaʊərˌpʊs, ˈsaʊər-/
–noun Informal.
a person having a grouchy disposition that is often accompanied by a scowling facial expression.

It seems she is and becoming more so every day. Obama's (the empty suit) magic train has left the station and the sourpuss syndrome becomes her. Her real personality is a sourpuss. As she is stressed you will see the sour and the puss become more vindictive and desperate to catch the Obama magic train. She will do anything at any cost to win the nomination. Another blogger said Obama better watch his back and I agree. Hell has no fury like a woman scorned!

popularism is just a snake oil salesman selling you a lie

Would you look at this! Look at those eyes. Is this the change you want. She thinks what she has done borders on genius. It borders on a concept of (popularism a more politically correct alternative term) Its Cotton candy, fluff talk, the popularism dirty tricks to get your vote. Feel good talk that is motivating you through your emotions and not your logic. Its just like putting a frog in boiling water. The frog (average feel good American) is being deceived into thinking there is no danger but the danger lies in the feel good Americans emotional response to fluff and cotton candy feel good ombama and clinton deceptions. They transform themselves into your hero and protector. I think they are just modern day snake oil salesmen. They are telling you this bottle of stuff will do anything but once you have bought it and found out it just watered down jin, the feel good feeling will wear off and you will be asking yourself, why did I let myself be suckered in to believing this crap?
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Rush Limbaugh is right. The word populist. What is populism? What is a populist? The dictionary definition is often, as in the case of dictionary definitions today of liberal and conservative, it is not helpful. But the dictionary definition of populist is: "A member or adherent of a political party seeking to represent the interests of ordinary people; a person who holds or who is concerned with the views of ordinary people." The root here is... Well, there was a Populist Party. It was formed in 1891 and at the time the Populist Party "advocated the interests of labor and farmers, the free coinage of silver, and a graduated income tax along with government control of monopolies." Now, the modern interpretation of populist, as I use it today, is not complimentary. A populist in this sense of "seeking to represent the interests of ordinary people," this is what people who employ populism want the ordinary people to think: that they are "one of them"; in fact, that they are from them; that they understand the ordinary, and that the ordinary are being shafted, and that the ordinary are being creamed, and the ordinary are being ignored.

So the populist comes along and says, "Not only am I for you, I'm of you, and I am going to go to Washington and I'm going to make sure that we ordinary people kick butt and we're going to kick the butts of the elites and we're going to kick the butt of the establishment! We're going to do this and we're going to do that." Most of them who do this are already from the establishment! They're elected governors. They're senators, or what have you. So it becomes a technique to relate to people on an emotional basis with a false promise, and that is that any one individual can solve all the problems of the ordinary. (Rush Limbaugh)
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Obama said, "One of my opponents said we can't just, you know, offer the American people false hopes about what we can get done,"

Clinton told Democratic voters they should elect "a doer, not a talker."

Both are nothing but talkers. They don't have any real records at all. Both offer false hopes both are just snake oil salesmen. I ask you, what have they done? Think about this, really nothing. Empty records of both. No real leadership, only talk. Unreal! Read the crap below. Both in reality are the same thing over and over again, just empty do nothing records. You can expect great things but what you will find is an empty bottle that was not the cure!

"The real gamble in this election is to do the same things, with the same folks, playing the same games over and over and over again and somehow expect a different result," he said. "That is a gamble we cannot afford, that is a risk we cannot take. Not this time. Not now. It is time to turn the page."

Lets caucus like we did last summer

Please note the over complicated way democrates elect delegates to their state convention. It is obvious the democrates want to mico manage the voter. The same way a democrate will micro manage the american citizen if a liberal democrate gets elected because of media fluff. I just saw the campaign coordinator for obama on tv and she said the country was ready for cool. I guess she means "cool" is enough to run for president and be elected to do what, be cool? If I were voting cool would not be one of the qualities I would be looking for. Cool plus empty suit equals empty suit plus cool. All I have seen is fake politicans lieing through their teeth. The only person who has any credibility is Fred Thompson, but he is not a true conservative. Slim pickins at the caucus. Lets caucus and find a real candidate who is not a fake and a real leader. One like Ronald Reagan. Is this possible? I can't think of anyone who fits this bill. If we caucus long enough maybe we could come up with someone. Its a nice thought.



The Iowa Caucus

In Iowa, the caucuses themselves are local party precinct meetings where registered Republicans and Democrats gather, discuss the candidates and vote for their candidate of choice for their party's nomination (Iowa caucuses actually occur every two years - in non-presidential-election years, participants generally discuss party platform issues). In both parties, the purpose of the caucus vote is to select delegates to attend a county convention -- each caucus sends a certain number of delegates, based on the population it represents. The delegates at the county convention in turn select delegates to go to the congressional district state convention, and those delegates choose the delegates that go to the national convention.

The Republican caucus voting system in Iowa is relatively straightforward: You come in, you vote, typically through secret ballot, and the percentages of the group supporting each candidate decides what delegates will go on to the county convention.

The Democrats have a more complex system -- in fact, it's one of the most complex pieces of the entire presidential election. In a typical caucus, registered democrats gather at the precinct meeting places (there are close to 2,000 precincts statewide), supporters for each candidate have a chance to make their case, and then the participants gather into groups supporting particular candidates (undecided voters also cluster into a group). In order for a particular group to be viable, they must have a certain percentage of the all the caucus participants. If they don't have enough people, the group disbands, and its members go to another group. The percentage cut-off is determined by the number of delegates assigned to the precinct. It breaks down like this:

* If the precinct has only one delegate, the group with the most people wins the delegate vote, and that's it.
* If the precinct has only two delegates, each group needs 25 percent to be viable.
* If the precinct has only three delegates, each group needs one-sixth of the caucus participants.
* If the precinct has four or more delegates, each group needs at least 15 percent of the caucus participants.

Once the groups are settled, the next order of business is to figure out how many of that precinct's delegates each group (and by extension, each candidate) should win. Here's the formula:

(Number of people in the group * number of delegates)/ number of caucus participants­

­ For example, say a precinct has four delegates, 200 caucus participants, and 100 people support John Doe. To figure out how many delegates you assign to John Doe, you would multiply 100 by four, to get 400. You divide 400 by 200 and get 2. So John Doe gets two of the four delegates.

The media reports the "winner," based on the percentage of delegates going to each candidate. This isn't exactly accurate, since it's actually the state convention that decides what delegates go to the national convention, but more often than not, there's a clear statewide winner after the caucuses.

The convoluted caucus system dates back to 1796, when American political parties emerged, and it hasn't changed a whole lot since then. Most states eventually replaced this system, because as political parties became more centralized and sophisticated in the early twentieth century, party leaders or "bosses" were perceived as exerting too much control over choosing a nominee. To give individual voters more influence over the nomination process, party leaders created the presidential primary system. Florida held the first primary in 1901 marking the beginning of the presidential primary we know today.

Dramatic caucus reforms and rules that the Democratic Party instituted at the state level in the 1970s changed the system significantly. Designed to improve and open up caucuses to all party members, the requirements actually made caucuses more difficult to manage and inadvertently led to the rise of primaries. To help states coordinate the election days of both parties, the Republicans also changed their system.

You can learn more about the United States democratic process by reading the links on the next page.

Huckabee The Huckster

huck·ster One who uses aggressive, showy, and sometimes devious methods to promote or sell a product. To promote or attempt to sell (a commercial product, for example) in an overaggressive or showy manner.

Devious is the key word here. This guy has a potential,"it depends on what is, is type" of twisting in a devious way the facts while trying to act in a moral way. It would have been ok to run the ad on romney's flip flop's but to explain he is not going to be negative by running the ad and then displaying it for all to see at is news conference is very devious. Even the reporters laughed out loud when he explained his point! I don't believe this guy can be trusted nor do I believe he is honest. It seems most of the republican candidates are not worth voting for because they are not real conservatives just liberal or moderates repackaged as are most of the democraps candiates. I don't see any of them that I would vote for. What a mess of crap the voter has to walk through. This time around at the election not only must the voter hold his nose and vote but also bend over and grab their ankles. It seems to be all media hype with no real candidates. No real choice so here comes another ross perot to give the election to someone like ms hillery. It doesn't look good.

Huckabee pulls negative ad, vows to go positive
By Sam Youngman | Posted: 12/31/07 2:58 PM [ET]
December 31, 2007

DES MOINES – Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) told reporters Monday that he was pulling a negative ad designed to target his chief rival in Iowa, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R).

Then he showed the ad to a room packed wall to wall with reporters.

When asked if it is hypocritical to make an announcement about not running negative ads, and then show a negative advertisement to dozens of members of the national and local media, Huckabee said he had to show the ad to prove its existence.

“I want to show you that we were fully prepared,” Huckabee said.

The former governor said the ad, which hits Romney on the issues of taxes and abortion, was set to start running in Iowa Monday at noon.

He said he made the decision earlier in the morning that he does not want to run a negative campaign. As a result, he said he will not run any ads going after Romney or other Republican rivals.

Perhaps because voters in other states do not respond as adversely to negative campaigning, Huckabee refused to rule out running similar ads in other states. For now, he said he wants to see how Iowans react to his strategy.

Huckabee said the ad cost about $30,000 to make, and the original purpose of the press conference was to introduce the spot to the media.

But the former governor said he had a change of heart shortly before the media assembled. Easels outlining the attacks on Romney were still standing in the room, and Huckabee stood in front of a banner that read “Enough is Enough.”

“It’s never too late to do the right thing,” he said.

In the ad, Huckabee says that Romney’s healthcare plan in Massachusetts allowed for $50 co-pays for abortions.

At the end of the ad, Huckabee again makes the point that Romney’s attacks on him have been “desperate and dishonest.”

“If a man’s dishonest to obtain a job, he’ll be dishonest on the job,” Huckabee says in the ad.

Huckabee acknowledged that his decision not to run counter ads to Romney’s is “a huge gamble,” and he conceded that Romney’s ads targeting him had hurt him.

But, he said, “if you gain the whole world and lose your soul, what does it profit you?”

The Romney campaign responded by again going after Huckabee’s record as governor, and in one email, the campaign described Huckabee’s ploy to announce he is not running the ad then following that up by showing it to reporters as a “meltdown.”

“We’re proud that Governor Romney has run a campaign about the issues that are important to voters,” Romney spokesman Kevin Madden said in a statement. “Governor Romney has worked hard to talk about the vision and experience he has when it comes to keeping taxes low, cutting wasteful spending and securing our borders. He’s worked hard to make his case to voters about leading a Republican Party that will strengthen the American family.”

Madden continued: “Mike Huckabee’s troubling record of higher taxes and spending binges is clearly not holding up well under scrutiny. Mike Huckabee has turned from nice to very hot-tempered and volatile now that his record has been examined by voters.

“It’s Mike Huckabee's record. It’s definitely a tough record for him to defend, but it’s still a record that belongs to Mike Huckabee.”

Huckabee is quoting gospel but acting in a manner that questions his motives and honesty! He says that Romneys ads are not truthful, yet they accurately display his record. This means huckabee is lying. He says his is not going to run negative ads yet he displays one at a news conference. Again this is a bold lie. He is actually doing and saying the opposite of what he says his is doing. This is just what ms hillary and other democrates do. As soon as they open their mouth they change their position or lie about what they just said. How crazy is this!

Cheese Herion (black tar herion mixed with tylenol pm)

Drug dealers peddling new kid-friendly mixes. This is something I was not aware of but thought it should be published for your information. This sicko stuff comes straight from mexico via illegal aliens.

Meth, heroin laced with candy and strawberry flavoring to appeal to youth.
'Cheese' heroin is shown wrapped in school notebook paper. Cheese heroin is a mixture of black tar heroin, a less refined form of the drug, and ground up Tylenol PM.

In their quest to lure new, younger clientele, drug dealers are mixing their wares with over-the-counter pain remedies and other familiar products — even candy — and peddling them under non-threatening names.

One such concoction, a blend of black tar heroin and Tylenol PM that goes by the name “cheese,” has been linked to the deaths of 19 teenagers in Dallas, including two 15-year-olds.

“If you’re a drug dealer you have to target a new audience all the time,” said Garrison Courtney, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency spokesman. “It’s Marketing 101 for drug dealers.”

Examples of the drug-mixing strategy also include candy laced with marijuana and, in several states, flavored methamphetamine. In Arkansas recently, a mix of meth and strawberry-flavored powder normally used to create a children’s milk drink turned up under the name “Strawberry Quick.”

“They’re calling it ‘cheese,’ they’re not calling it ‘heroin,”’ said Dr. Collin Goto, a toxicologist at Children’s Medical Center Dallas. “It becomes much more appealing to younger kids because it doesn’t have the stigma, they’re not as afraid to get started.”

Dallas school district police first became aware of the heroin-mixing trend in 2005, and its become a disturbing local phenomenon since.

“Cheese is just a different makeup for mixing with heroin, but it’s still heroin,” said Dr. Jeffrey Barnard, chief medical examiner for Dallas County. “It’s the heroin that’s the problem.”

Cheap and needle-free

Beyond the innocuous name, several other factors appear to be driving the popularity of cheese. Kids often buy the drug from other kids. It’s affordable, selling for about $2 a dosage. And it is snorted rather than injected.

During the 2005-2006 school year, the Dallas school district police arrested 90 students for possession of the heroin-Tylenol PM mixture. The number has soared during the current school year. Through February, 122 have been arrested. The average age of those arrested: 14.


The latest meth cut, known as "Strawberry Quick," uses a powdered drink mix to give the drug a pink coloring. The sweetness of the powder can make meth more palatable and partially masks its harsh chemical taste.

“The resurgence of heroin in society in 11- to 16-year-olds — that’s unprecedented,” said Julian Bernal, deputy chief of narcotics for the Dallas police, who makes six to 12 arrests a month for possession of cheese heroin.

“Hopefully we can try to contain it,” said Dr. Sing-Yi Feng, another toxicologist at Children’s Medical Center Dallas. “The concern is that the stuff is pretty cheap. It’s easy to use.”

Experts say cheese usually has about 2 percent to 8 percent heroin mixed with the Tylenol PM — which contains acetaminophen and diphenhydramine — or similar over-the-counter drugs.

‘Cheese’ arrests rising

Gary Hodges, deputy chief of the Dallas school district police, said cheese arrests in the district have nearly equaled those for marijuana, still the leading substance involved in drug arrests.

Authorities say they are just now beginning to understand how widespread the mixture has become and the toll it is taking on Dallas area youth. Even the exact number of cheese heroin-related deaths was not known until The Dallas Morning News analyzed medical examiner records and published the results last month.

“Basically, it flew under the radar screen,” said Zachary Thompson, director of Dallas County Health and Human Services and a member of the Dallas County task force on cheese.

Most of the victims are male, and involve nearly equal numbers of white and Hispanic youth.

Dave Cannata’s 16-year-old son, Nick, died in June 2005, with heroin and diphenhydramine in his system. Nick Cannata, who had been in rehab for a drug problem the summer before, was found dead in his bed in Coppell, just outside of Dallas.

He had spent the day building a deck with his father before going to a friend’s house. Dave Cannata said he knew something was wrong when his son returned home that night, but he decided to delay a confrontation.

“If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t hesitate to pick up the phone and call 911,” said Cannata. “It’s alarming the epidemic proportion of kids that are messing with this stuff.”

Olga Sanchez agrees. She thought her 15-year-old son had stopped using the mixture. But this spring, Oscar Gutierrez’s brother found the eighth-grader at a Dallas middle school dead in bed.

“He was very purple. He was very cold, cold,” said Sanchez, who had been attending drug counseling with her son since discovering his cheese habit last fall.

“I would like for kids to realize that lots of other kids have died, that they should look for help, that they could lose their life,” she said.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18557266/wid/11915773/

Hillary don't ask don't tell

Don't ask don't tell at rallys.
Clinton's "don't ask" policy

As she races through Iowa in the days before next week's caucuses, Hillary Clinton is taking few chances. She tells crowds that it’s their turn to “pick a president,’’ but over the last two days she has not invited them to ask her any questions.

Before the brief Christmas break, the New York senator had been setting aside time after campaign speeches to hear from the audience. Now when she’s done speaking, her theme songs blare from loudspeakers, preventing any kind of public Q&A.

She was no more inviting when a television reporter approached her after a rally on Thursday and asked if she was “moved’’ by Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Clinton turned away without answering.
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She knows that someone could ask her a real question requiring a real answer. Because she is a political placard poised to portray a competent woman who can deal with off the cuff answers to complicated questions she must not let this mith be exploded. In reality she has trouble just answering simple questions about everything.
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PEGGY NOONAN
Hillary Clinton? No, not reasonable. I concede her sturdy mind, deep sophistication, and seriousness of intent. I see her as a triangulator like her husband, not a radical but a maneuverer in the direction of a vague, half-forgotten but always remembered, leftism. It is also true that she has a command-and-control mentality, an urgent, insistent and grating sense of destiny, and she appears to believe that any act that benefits Clintons is a virtuous act, because Clintons are good and deserve to be benefited.

But this is not, actually, my central problem with her candidacy. My central problem is that the next American president will very likely face another big bad thing, a terrible day, or days, and in that time it will be crucial--crucial--that our nation be led by a man or woman who can be, at least for the moment and at least in general, trusted. Mrs. Clinton is the most dramatically polarizing, the most instinctively distrusted, political figure of my lifetime. Yes, I include Nixon. Would she be able to speak the nation through the trauma? I do not think so. And if I am right, that simple fact would do as much damage to America as the terrible thing itself.
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I agree Ms clinton asks like a cold witch and who wants to be led by this kind of woman. She looks and talks like a cold calculating witch who would do anything to have the power of the president. She is not qualified in any way to be president, mentally or emotionally.

Clinton met bhutto 12 years ago, so what. Obama had tea at an ambassadors office, so what. These are statments by IDIOTS!

Its time to pick a president?

Hillery says its time to pick a president (Dec 27, 07) and then says the following:
“I want you to ask yourself, ‘Who will be the best president? Who, if something happened that none of us can predict now, would be there able to respond and act on behalf of our country immediately?’.”

Well if you think she can, I would ask you on what do you base this on?
Ms clinton can't even make up her mind on NY drivers license for Illegal Aliens!
She would vacillate if anything happened and would panic, having trouble making a valid national security decision. She has NO gravitas to "be there" whatever this tourched logic means. Acting immediately could mean responding in an illogical manner as has been her pattern in this political campaign.

Oh bama is also an empty suit who would respond to a threat like the empty suit he is. Its time to pick a president. Neither of these liberal deceivers would or could respond in a manner that can make us sleep better at night. Both are foreign policy headaches waiting to happen if elected. Incompetent people really have no clue as to their own failings or others skills. They are blissfully self-assured and ignorant of their own incompetence. Again I challenge anybody to tell me why these two political media blowup dolls could lead this country because of any past experience in dealing with foreign policy! I'm waiting.

Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find

Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,'' wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dunning. (In other words they are just to stupid to realize it) Barack Hussein Obama is a prime example.
Have You Vetted Barack Obama

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Do you know anyone like this? I do. They can be co-workers, management or anyone. "Management" is brimming with these type of people. Incompetent breeds more incompetentence. Overconfident, billegerent amd incompetent! Acquiring a "position" by default, or a waver of qualifications. I have personally known of 2 people who got their jobs by padding their resume which someone else wrote and typed. I know of people who got their job in spite of the fact they failed the qualifying test 3 times and it was waved the fourth time. I also know of a person who got a job by filing an "xxx" played the race card and was put in a postion and was not qualified, simply because of this.

I and others actually compensate for their incompetence daily by doing our own self management and correcting their erroneous conclusions and choices. Of course the upper crust gets falsely compensated and lauded for "their" accomplishments. What is management doing if the manager is delegating the supervision to others because the manager is incapable of supervising because of incompetence? This is what I call "figure head management" and empty suit or dress. Worst of all other supervisors cover for this incompetence. Why? It is easy to understand if you can say the word bonus or job security. Like I said incompetence breeds incompetence and perpetuates itself to the detriment of the EMPLOYEE! (EMPLOYEE is emphysized over employer)

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Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find
They're blind to own failings, others' skills

Erica Goode, New York Times

Tuesday, January 18, 2000

There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning is haunted by the fear that he might be one of them.

Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.

On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities -- more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.

``I began to think that there were probably lots of things that I was bad at, and I didn't know it,'' Dunning said.

One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.

The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

``Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,'' wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dunning.

This deficiency in ``self-monitoring skills,'' the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market -- and repeatedly lose out -- and of the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy.

In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most likely to ``grossly overestimate'' how well they had performed.

In all three tests, subjects' ratings of their ability were positively linked to their actual scores. But the lowest-ranked participants showed much greater distortions in their self-estimates.

Asked to evaluate their performance on the test of logical reasoning, for example, subjects who scored only in the 12th percentile guessed that they had scored in the 62nd percentile, and deemed their overall skill at logical reasoning to be at the 68th percentile.

Similarly, subjects who scored at the 10th percentile on the grammar test ranked themselves at the 67th percentile in the ability to ``identify grammatically correct standard English,'' and estimated their test scores to be at the 61st percentile.

On the humor test, in which participants were asked to rate jokes according to their funniness (subjects' ratings were matched against those of an ``expert'' panel of professional comedians), low-scoring subjects were also more apt to have an inflated perception of their skill. But because humor is idiosyncratically defined, the researchers said, the results were less conclusive.

Unlike unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study, Kruger and Dunning found, were likely to underestimate their competence. The researchers attributed this to the fact that, in the absence of information about how others were doing, highly competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were -- a phenomenon psychologists term the ``false consensus effect.''

When high-scoring subjects were asked to ``grade'' the grammar tests of their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their own performance. In contrast, the self-assessments of those who scored badly themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others; some subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own abilities.

``Incompetent individuals were less able to recognize competence in others,'' the researchers concluded.

In a final experiment, Dunning and Kruger set out to discover if training would help modify the exaggerated self-perceptions of incapable subjects. In fact, a short training session in logical reasoning did improve the ability of low-scoring subjects to assess their performance realistically, they found.

The findings, the psychologists said, support Thomas Jefferson's assertion that ``he who knows best knows how little he knows.''

And the research meshes neatly with other work indicating that overconfidence is common; studies have found, for example, that the vast majority of people rate themselves as ``above average'' on a wide array of abilities -- though such an abundance of talent would be impossible in statistical terms. This overestimation, studies indicate, is more likely for tasks that are difficult than for those that are easy.

Such studies are not without critics. Dr. David C. Funder, a psychology professor at the University of California at Riverside, for example, said he suspects that most lay people have only a vague idea of the meaning of ``average'' in statistical terms.

``I'm not sure the average person thinks of `average' or `percentile' in quite that literal a sense,'' Funder said, ``so `above average' might mean to them `pretty good,' or `OK,' or `doing all right.' And if, in fact, people mean something subjective when they use the word, then it's really hard to evaluate whether they're right or wrong, using the statistical criterion.''

But Dunning said his current research and past studies indicated there are many reasons why people would tend to overestimate their competency and not be aware of it.

In various situations, feedback is absent, or at least ambiguous; even a humorless joke, for example, is likely to be met with polite laughter. And faced with incompetence, social norms prevent most people from blurting out ``You stink!'' -- truthful though this assessment may be.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=c/a/2000/01/18/MN73840.DTL