http://www.goal.org/news/bradypollingreport.htm
Brady Campaign Election Polling Report Laughable
Recently a GOAL member sent me an editorial clipping from the Falmouth Enterprise. The article is dated Friday, November 28, 2008. The editorial goes on at length touting a new report by the Brady Campaign that United States voters have overwhelmingly swung towards supporting so-called reasonable gun control. The problem seems to be that the editorial was published without any journalistic effort involved and is actually just a regurgitation of the Brady Campaign press release.
This all originated from when the Brady Campaign hired the Washington D.C. firm Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (PSB) to conduct some post 2008 presidential election voter polling. In the after action memo from PSB to the Brady Campaign, the reference to the polling results was entitled “Post-Election Analysis: Sensible gun laws builds bridges not burn them to moderates, McCain, and even gun owners in post-Heller world”. The memo can be found at http://www.bradycampaign.org/xshare/pdf/memo-11-18-08.pdf
The report from PSB claims that the National Rifle Association (NRA) has lost its power and no longer represents the opinions of Americans, gun owners and non-gun owners. It claims that:
More than three-quarters said they would support reasonable gun restrictions.
There is extensive support for a wide variety of gun restrictions, including criminal background checks, registration, assault weapon bans, and a five-day waiting period for handgun sales.
Voters also say that they want to get things done quickly during the upcoming Obama Presidency.
Before anyone, and most surely a journalist, can take these claims seriously one would think they would do at least a cursory bit of research into who is involved in making these claims. Since the Falmouth Enterprise didn’t seem to have that desire, we decided to take a crack at it. It would take volumes to fit all the information we found, so we put together a short summary.
According to the PSB website, the president of the company is Mark J. Penn. Wikipedia.com lists Mr. Penn as Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist for most of her 2008 presidential campaign. During his company’s involvement, it billed the Clinton campaign a reported total of $14,000,000. According to some sources Penn’s company is still owed over $5,000,000 of that figure. In fact, according to sourcewatch.org Mr. Penn has been working for both of the Clintons in one form or another since the mid 1990’s (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mark_Penn)
In April of 2008 Penn “left” the Clinton campaign after trying to negotiate a free trade agreement with a Colombian government official supposedly against Hillary’s wishes.
Another interesting factor is that the report claims to have polled gun owners. While it is tough to pin down, I was curious and did a web search with the names Mark Penn and American Hunters and Shooters (AHSA). If you want some interesting reading, try it and you’ll be amazed how many times those two names show up together. Massachusetts gun owners remember all too well that AHSA was cofounded by John Rosenthal of Stop Handgun Violence (SHV) for the sole purpose of driving a wedge between gun owners in an attempt to topple the NRA. Rosenthal was also the leader in pushing for the current disastrous gun laws in Massachusetts.
One blogger at http://www.rightmichigan.com/story/2008/4/18/233911/219 actually states that it was Penn and his firm who did the polling and research that developed the concept of dividing gun owners through a phony misleading organization that became American Hunters and Shooters.
For what it is worth, Mark Penn is also married to Nancy Jacobson. According to many sources, Jacobson has been a long standing leader in the Democratic party fundraising. She played a pivotal role in bringing Bill Clinton to power and into the White House. In 1991 she was the third person hired by the Bill Clinton presidential campaign and was later appointed as finance chair of the Democratic National Committee.
So after doing some basic journalistic work, a rational person would quickly come to the conclusion that PSB might not be exactly objective in their pursuit of information. This information sheds some light on how PSB would conduct such a poll and produce the requested information.
While there is endless information about Mr. Penn and his political connections, the actual report from PSB was submitted by Robert Green and Matt Bechak for whom there seems to be little information. It is telling however, when one reads the press release with quotes from Mr. Green concerning the report at http://www.bradycampaign.org/media/release.php?release=1085 such as:
“Perhaps the most compelling purely political story in this data is that the National Rifle Association is losing their old power to turn elections.”
Such a statement seems hardly something one would read from an objective professional polling company. Though perhaps the most ludicrous and telling statement from Mr. Green was:
“It is no longer plausible for opponents of gun legislation to assert that gun laws will somehow lead to a total gun ban. The right to own a gun is now recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court but so is the principle that reasonable restrictions are permissible.”
I can’t imagine this being said by a professional whose job is to acquire unbiased statistical information. As far as the plausibility of a total gun ban through legislation, Mr. Green should take an objective honest look at the 1998 legislation that led to a Decade of Disaster in Massachusetts that that resulted in an 85% reduction in lawful gun ownership, 70% increase in gun related homicides, licensing official corruption, illegal over charging for licenses and fraudulent “consumer protection” regulations on handguns just to name a few.
So where does this leave us? Aside from the information that any freshman journalism student could have discovered, that exposes the polling company for what it is there is the laughable position the Brady Campaign is attempting to claim from the results of the report. Using these bogus and obviously manufactured results, the Brady Campaign is spending a lot of political and media capital in a not so veiled attempt to fool the general public that their anti-civil rights and borderline anarchistic agenda represents mainstream America.
If all of the information uncovered about those involved in this report isn’t enough to make your head spin, hang on to your hat. All of the claims made in the report are based on the polling of just 1,083 people! That’s right, the high and mighty claims made in the report and press release are supposedly justified by hiring a biased polling company that based their “results” on polling only 1,083 voters out of total of the 128,000,000 people who cast votes in the 2008 presidential election. That’s just under 22 people per state or 1 in 118,190 voters. While fully realizing that polling companies do work on percentages, no rational sane person can hold a straight face and claim to represent the American public’s will by using such miniscule numbers ginned up by a blatantly transparent biased polling company.
Once again, the anti-civil rights special interest crowd has used its wealth and media influence to present bogus misleading information to the general public. Once again they have managed to do so with nary a “journalist” asking a single question or doing a key stroke worth of investigation into the validity of such a report. The bottom line is until honest citizens can overcome the wealthy vocal minority elite and the overtly biased lazy media, citizen’s rights will continue to be eroded and crime will continue to increase. So as the new President Elect mentioned, cling tight to your religion, your guns, your children and anything else you hold dear because if the people responsible for this mess get their way, you will lose them all.
Brady Campaign Election Polling Report Laughable
Recently a GOAL member sent me an editorial clipping from the Falmouth Enterprise. The article is dated Friday, November 28, 2008. The editorial goes on at length touting a new report by the Brady Campaign that United States voters have overwhelmingly swung towards supporting so-called reasonable gun control. The problem seems to be that the editorial was published without any journalistic effort involved and is actually just a regurgitation of the Brady Campaign press release.
This all originated from when the Brady Campaign hired the Washington D.C. firm Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (PSB) to conduct some post 2008 presidential election voter polling. In the after action memo from PSB to the Brady Campaign, the reference to the polling results was entitled “Post-Election Analysis: Sensible gun laws builds bridges not burn them to moderates, McCain, and even gun owners in post-Heller world”. The memo can be found at http://www.bradycampaign.org/xshare/pdf/memo-11-18-08.pdf
The report from PSB claims that the National Rifle Association (NRA) has lost its power and no longer represents the opinions of Americans, gun owners and non-gun owners. It claims that:
More than three-quarters said they would support reasonable gun restrictions.
There is extensive support for a wide variety of gun restrictions, including criminal background checks, registration, assault weapon bans, and a five-day waiting period for handgun sales.
Voters also say that they want to get things done quickly during the upcoming Obama Presidency.
Before anyone, and most surely a journalist, can take these claims seriously one would think they would do at least a cursory bit of research into who is involved in making these claims. Since the Falmouth Enterprise didn’t seem to have that desire, we decided to take a crack at it. It would take volumes to fit all the information we found, so we put together a short summary.
According to the PSB website, the president of the company is Mark J. Penn. Wikipedia.com lists Mr. Penn as Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist for most of her 2008 presidential campaign. During his company’s involvement, it billed the Clinton campaign a reported total of $14,000,000. According to some sources Penn’s company is still owed over $5,000,000 of that figure. In fact, according to sourcewatch.org Mr. Penn has been working for both of the Clintons in one form or another since the mid 1990’s (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mark_Penn)
In April of 2008 Penn “left” the Clinton campaign after trying to negotiate a free trade agreement with a Colombian government official supposedly against Hillary’s wishes.
Another interesting factor is that the report claims to have polled gun owners. While it is tough to pin down, I was curious and did a web search with the names Mark Penn and American Hunters and Shooters (AHSA). If you want some interesting reading, try it and you’ll be amazed how many times those two names show up together. Massachusetts gun owners remember all too well that AHSA was cofounded by John Rosenthal of Stop Handgun Violence (SHV) for the sole purpose of driving a wedge between gun owners in an attempt to topple the NRA. Rosenthal was also the leader in pushing for the current disastrous gun laws in Massachusetts.
One blogger at http://www.rightmichigan.com/story/2008/4/18/233911/219 actually states that it was Penn and his firm who did the polling and research that developed the concept of dividing gun owners through a phony misleading organization that became American Hunters and Shooters.
For what it is worth, Mark Penn is also married to Nancy Jacobson. According to many sources, Jacobson has been a long standing leader in the Democratic party fundraising. She played a pivotal role in bringing Bill Clinton to power and into the White House. In 1991 she was the third person hired by the Bill Clinton presidential campaign and was later appointed as finance chair of the Democratic National Committee.
So after doing some basic journalistic work, a rational person would quickly come to the conclusion that PSB might not be exactly objective in their pursuit of information. This information sheds some light on how PSB would conduct such a poll and produce the requested information.
While there is endless information about Mr. Penn and his political connections, the actual report from PSB was submitted by Robert Green and Matt Bechak for whom there seems to be little information. It is telling however, when one reads the press release with quotes from Mr. Green concerning the report at http://www.bradycampaign.org/media/release.php?release=1085 such as:
“Perhaps the most compelling purely political story in this data is that the National Rifle Association is losing their old power to turn elections.”
Such a statement seems hardly something one would read from an objective professional polling company. Though perhaps the most ludicrous and telling statement from Mr. Green was:
“It is no longer plausible for opponents of gun legislation to assert that gun laws will somehow lead to a total gun ban. The right to own a gun is now recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court but so is the principle that reasonable restrictions are permissible.”
I can’t imagine this being said by a professional whose job is to acquire unbiased statistical information. As far as the plausibility of a total gun ban through legislation, Mr. Green should take an objective honest look at the 1998 legislation that led to a Decade of Disaster in Massachusetts that that resulted in an 85% reduction in lawful gun ownership, 70% increase in gun related homicides, licensing official corruption, illegal over charging for licenses and fraudulent “consumer protection” regulations on handguns just to name a few.
So where does this leave us? Aside from the information that any freshman journalism student could have discovered, that exposes the polling company for what it is there is the laughable position the Brady Campaign is attempting to claim from the results of the report. Using these bogus and obviously manufactured results, the Brady Campaign is spending a lot of political and media capital in a not so veiled attempt to fool the general public that their anti-civil rights and borderline anarchistic agenda represents mainstream America.
If all of the information uncovered about those involved in this report isn’t enough to make your head spin, hang on to your hat. All of the claims made in the report are based on the polling of just 1,083 people! That’s right, the high and mighty claims made in the report and press release are supposedly justified by hiring a biased polling company that based their “results” on polling only 1,083 voters out of total of the 128,000,000 people who cast votes in the 2008 presidential election. That’s just under 22 people per state or 1 in 118,190 voters. While fully realizing that polling companies do work on percentages, no rational sane person can hold a straight face and claim to represent the American public’s will by using such miniscule numbers ginned up by a blatantly transparent biased polling company.
Once again, the anti-civil rights special interest crowd has used its wealth and media influence to present bogus misleading information to the general public. Once again they have managed to do so with nary a “journalist” asking a single question or doing a key stroke worth of investigation into the validity of such a report. The bottom line is until honest citizens can overcome the wealthy vocal minority elite and the overtly biased lazy media, citizen’s rights will continue to be eroded and crime will continue to increase. So as the new President Elect mentioned, cling tight to your religion, your guns, your children and anything else you hold dear because if the people responsible for this mess get their way, you will lose them all.
