Free Republic

On January 17, 2012, recall committees submitted recall signatures for Gov. Scott Walker, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, Sen. Pam Galloway, Sen. Terry Molten, and Sen. Van Wanggaard to Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board (“GAB”). Right away, the GAB began scanning recall petitions at a secret location. The GAB even set up a live web-cam where anyone can view the staff at work scanning and reviewing the recall signatures. There have been many concerns that thousands of fraudulent signatures would be counted in the recalls. During the 60 day circulation period, there were many reports of apparent...

This report by a Wisconsin Tea Party group is absolutely shocking. MacIver News Service | January 11, 2012 | [Milwaukee, Wisc] A shocking new report by a Wisconsin Tea Party group raises serious questions about the diligence of poll workers in Milwaukee County. The group, Wisconsin Grandsons of Liberty, found errors on more than one third of all Election Day Registration forms completed for the April 5, 2011 election in Milwaukee County. “We discovered 3,739 forms with errors,” said Larry Gamble, the groups’ spokesperson. “That 33.7% error rate is high enough to question the entire election process and raises doubts...

Bank of America and Morgan Stanley have agreed to pay more than $22 million combined to settle federal civil charges on improperly foreclosing on military personnel, The Associated Press reports. The latest home or commercial real estate news Sample Between 2006 and 2009, the mortgage lenders foreclosed on 178 military members in 22 states without getting court approval. The military members affected will each receive $125,562, on average. The banks will also continue to investigate whether improper foreclosures occurred in 2009 through 2010.

AUSTIN (KXAN) - KXAN Austin News has uncovered dozens of cases in which unpaid tolls have turned into bills as high as tens of thousands of dollars. Toll roads first came to Central Texas four years ago. There are now a total of five tollways, including Texas Toll 130 in East Travis and Williamson counties. The bottom line is the toll bills were not paid, and they ended up becoming criminal cases. Although drivers can pay with cash at most tolls, use their TxTag or Pay by Mail as the signs say, some drivers contend the last option poses a...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US President Barack Obama admitted having made tactical errors but stood by his accomplishments Sunday in an interview weeks ahead of crucial midterm elections. Obama confessed to the The New York Times that during his first 20 months in office he had probably not focused enough on public relations, which, like it or not, is an all-important part of the job. "Given how much stuff was coming at us, we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right," he was quoted as saying in a lengthy magazine...

Perhaps Paul Krugman believes that by labeling other economists as politically extreme, he can undercut their credibility. But his is badly weakened by the myriad errors he makes. Paul Krugman and Robin Wells caricature my recent book Fault Lines in an article in the New York Review of Books. The article, and their criticism, however, do have a lot to say about Krugman’s policy views (for simplicity, I will say “Krugman” and “he” instead of “Krugman and Wells” and “they”), which I have disagreed with in the past. Rather than focus on the innuendo about my motives and beliefs in...

Bereaved families are to be told that organs were removed from loved ones without consent after a huge blunder affecting the UK donor register. Around 800,000 people have had their wishes about the use of their organs wrongly recorded due to an error. An investigation found that 45 individuals for whom false data were stored have since died. The NHS is about to contact approximately 20 families who allowed organs to be taken after being misinformed about what consent had previously been given. Joyce Robins of pressure group Patient Concern told the Sunday Telegraph: "This Government has got an absolutely...

In Sunday’s column by Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander, the increase in typos and other copy editing errors stood trial. Apparently, angry letters have started coming more frequently, wondering, for example, “If they don’t care about basics like grammar and spelling, how much do they care about factual accuracy?” Alexander served up the standard Old Media 2010 answer: our staffs have shrunk! But he also had a bizarre new scapegoat, namely, search engine optimization. Huh? “Through buyouts and voluntary departures, the number of full-time copy editors declined from about 75 to 43 between early 2005 and mid-2008,” he explained. “There...

The Syllabus of the principal errors of our time, which are stigmatized in the Consistorial Allocutions, Encyclicals, and other Apostolical Letters of our Most Holy Lord, Pope Pius IX. I.— PANTHEISM, NATURALISM, AND ABSOLUTE RATIONALISM. 1. There exists no supreme, most wise, and most provident divine being distinct from the universe, and God is none other than nature, and is therefore subject to change. In effect, God is produced in man and in the world, and all things are God, and have the very substance of God. God is therefore one and the same thing with the world, and thence...

Health minister characterizes reports of 20% to 30% error rates as highly exaggerated Questions about a possible high rate of errors in breast cancer testing done in the Canadian province of Quebec surfaced last week. Government health officials were forced to publicly acknowledge that they had received a report in April of a limited study that indicated an error rate of between 15% and 20% in hormone receptor testing, and an error rate as high as 30% in HER2/neu testing. Following the first news reports of this situation last Thursday, Quebec health officials scrambled to respond to public concerns. In...

WASHINGTON – New questions surfaced Wednesday about the accuracy of a CIA document meant to settle who in Congress knew about severe interrogation methods approved by the Bush administration. Three new errors appeared to emerge in the CIA's matrix of 40 congressional briefings on so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. Those techniques include waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning, which President Barack Obama has called torture. The CIA acknowledged one of the errors but continued to stand by its version of events in the other two cases.

President Obama, it should be noted, is not a particularly big drinker, though he has been known to enjoy a vodka martini time and again.

We are a little late to the party, but it is worth adding a few words now that our favourite amateur contrarian is at it again. As many already know, the Forum on Physics and Society (an un-peer-reviewed newsletter published by the otherwise quite sensible American Physical Society), rather surprisingly published a new paper by Monckton that tries again to show using rigorous arithmetic that IPCC is all wrong and that climate sensitivity is negligible. His latest sally, like his previous attempt, is full of the usual obfuscating sleight of hand, but to save people the time in working it...

WASHINGTON - Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has stopped telling a story of a pregnant woman's medical tragedy after an Ohio hospital challenged its accuracy last weekend. But recent accounts of the episode have omitted key details that suggest there was more truth in the essence of Clinton's tale than her critics, and even her presidential campaign, have acknowledged. Since early March, the New York senator has often told campaign audiences a heartbreaking story of a young Ohio woman who began having problems with her pregnancy. She said the woman was twice turned away by a local hospital because she...

Source: American Roentgen Ray Society Date: May 6, 2007 Voice Recognition Systems Seem To Make More Errors WIth Women's Dictation Science Daily — There is a significantly higher rate of transcription error in women compared to men when using commercial voice recognition applications, according to a recent study. "Our residency program and department recently made the transition to speech recognition from a digital dictation system," said Syed Ali, MD, lead author of the study. "This prompted us to ask research questions about how to increase our accuracy rates and what factors adversely impacted speech recognition," said Dr. Ali. Ten radiology...

he Texas state auditor has concluded that transportation officials used inflated numbers when they reported an $86 billion funding gap for highways and transportation projects. The audit released April 30 has a familiar ring to it because it is the second scathing review of transportation funding estimates this year in the state. State Auditor John Keel said the $86 billion estimate by Texas Department of Transportation officials should be more like $77.4 billion, but that’s not all. Nearly $38 billion of that estimate took into account undocumented cost estimates from city officials competing for shared transportation dollars. Keel’s team of...

Report says that more than $45 billion of the estimate is either in error or undocumented. The state auditor's office on Monday challenged the validity of more than half of a purported $86 billion shortfall in Texas transportation funding over the next generation and cautioned that the estimate "may not be reliable for making policy or funding decisions." That $86 billion, based on 2004 figures, has been cited repeatedly by Texas Department of Transportation officials and some legislators as a major reason for the state's increasing need for new toll roads. The number is a compilation of estimates from local...

Report says that more than $45 billion of the estimate is either in error or undocumented. The State Auditor's Office this morning released a report challenging the validity of almost half of a purported $86 billion shortfall in Texas transportation funding over the next generation, and cautioning that the gap estimate "may not be reliable for making policy or funding decisions." That $86 billion figure has been cited repeatedly by Texas Department of Transportation officials and some legislators as a major reason for the state's increasing need for new toll roads. The number is a compilation of estimates from local...

LOS ANGELES -- The state Mental Health Department agreed to pay a Los Angeles hotel $877 million in 2005 to hold a two-day training conference, according to state records. $877 million? For a two-day conference? It's wrong -- not even close. The actual contract was $36,200 and the agency spent only about $21,000, invoices show. Inclusion of the dramatically higher amount in a vast computerized index of state contracts was an honest mistake, the result of a worker typing a billing code where the contract's value should have been listed, officials say. An attempted fix created a duplicate listing, leading...

Uncovered: Many Errors by Election Clerks Protect Marriage Illinois and the Illinois Family Institute recently filed a complaint in Federal Court to protect the rights of Illinois citizens who have, in good faith, petitioned their government for a Marriage Protection Referendum to be placed on the Illinois General Election ballot on November 7, 2006. Background For the past three weeks PMI, IFI and dozens of good hearted volunteers have been analyzing thousands of signatures -- signatures that were "invalidated" by various Illinois Election Authorities (Boards of Election in Chicago, Cook, DuPage, Stark and others) in a random sample of PMI's...

When figuring out what to do about the overall energy situation, or predicting the future, I confess to having some degree of modesty. Looking at all the bad predictions from smart people in the past, it's easy to be less than confident when it comes to forecasting what's going to happen 10 and 50 years from now with oil, solar batteries, wave power, ethanol, Chinese motoring, hybrid cars, nuclear power, energy wars, windmills, bicycle sales, wood chips, melting glaciers or switch grass. Here, for example, are some of the more notable predictions from experts on things a lot less complicated...

WASHINGTON - The House ethics committee's top Democrat, under fire from Republicans, said Friday he's unaware of any errors in his financial disclosures the past nine years. Rep. Alan Mollohan (news, bio, voting record), D-W.Va., provided a detailed explanation of his investments a week after a conservative group questioned the accuracy of his annual financial reporting. Republican campaign officials called for his resignation from the ethics panel, but Mollohan refused to step down. The allegations could have an impact on the ethics committee's ability to investigate wrongdoing and could be a factor in this year's congressional elections. The committee has...

Private auditors have found that San Diego overstated its net assets by more than $640 million in fiscal 2002 – a problem that portends greater difficulty for the city's restoration to sound fiscal health. The city's net assets will be lowered almost 10 percent from their reported total of $6.8 billion, a miscalculation used in three bond offerings, which opens the city to possible lawsuits and new federal sanctions and fines. The errors include the double counting of roads and bridges, delays in depreciating the value of water and sewer plants, and the inclusion of abandoned capital projects as well...

So the LORD gave Israel all the land which He had sworn to give to their fathers, and they possessed it and lived in it. And the LORD gave them rest on every side, according to all that He had sworn to their fathers, and no one of all their enemies stood before them; the LORD gave all their enemies into their hand. Not one of the good promises which the LORD had made to the house of Israel failed; all came to pass (Joshua 21:43-45). The return of the Jews to the land of Israel is a major...

I love a Washington feeding frenzy don't you? I mean, aren't we all glued to our seats to watch the next roasting (I mean press briefing) starring Scott McClellan? Months and years of a tightly wound and controlled Bush White House has forced the MSM (mainstream media) to lose their collective minds over the prospect of delivering Karl Rove's head on a silver platter to their friends on the Left side of the aisle in the Beltway. And just as the Left continues to embarrass themselves with righteous indignation over President Bush's refusal to allow them to name the next...

* There are a couple of issues which attend to this Newsweek thing. First, there is the First Amendment to the Constitution. For those of us who haven't actually read the First Amendment since 8th Grade Social Studies, here it is: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. * This is a pretty big bag of freedoms in one Amendment. Religion, speech,...

Sometimes I get the idea that my daily newspaper, the L.A. Times, is cutting a few too many corners. I’m getting the feeling that in a desperate attempt to save a few bucks, they’ve slashed not only editors, copyreaders and fact checkers, but even reporters with junior high diplomas. I mean, it’s one thing to put out a newspaper while keeping an eye on the bottom line and quite another to hire a bunch of people who can’t spell bottom line. Having studied the paper closely for the past several months, I’d say that the mistakes fall mainly into three...

"Congress shall create a Tax Code weighing more than the combined poundage of the largest member of the House and the largest member of the Senate, plus a standard musk ox." Article I, Section VI of the Constitution of the United States (according to "Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway") It's that time of year again. Dig out the receipts showing every possible legal deduction. Find all those canceled checks proving that you paid all those doctor bills last year. Add up the mileage for all those business-related trips you took. Put it all into a shoebox, take it down...

As a rule, when I write a piece about all the mistakes my newspaper, the L.A. Times, makes, I have to wait a week or even two to compile a selection large enough to make it worth our while. It’s not that they don’t come up with a ready supply on a daily basis. Heck, UPS doesn’t deliver the goods with such regularity. But some of the goofs are simply too boring to mention, as when they get the days and times of certain events wrong or when they simply misspell someone’s name. Sometimes, too, the corrections run even longer...

NEW YORK (AP) - City officials recalled preparation material for math tests that had been sent to teachers after discovering they were filled with math and spelling mistakes. The materials were designed for math students in grades 3 through 7, and had been sent to math coaches and local instructional superintendents. The errors were found late Wednesday before the guide reached classrooms. Several answers in the guide were wrong. There were also sloppy diagrams and improper notation of exponents. There were at least 18 errors in the guide, and grammar and spelling issues proved just as problematic as the math....

Beware not the ides but the start of March – and April and May and every month. In the first few days of each month, fatalities due to medication errors rise by as much as 25 percent above normal, according to new research by University of California, San Diego sociologist David Phillips. Published in the January issue of Pharmacotherapy, the journal of the American College of Clinical Pharmacy, the study is the first to document a beginning-of-the-month spike in deaths attributed to mistakes in prescription drugs. The primary suspect, Phillips says, is a beginning-of-the-month increase in pharmacy workloads and a...

In the first public disclosure of its kind, Minnesota hospitals acknowledged medical errors that caused 20 deaths and four serious disabilities over a 15-month period, according to a report released Wednesday. Thirty hospitals across the state reported preventable errors such as bedsores, fatal falls or surgery on the wrong body part or patient. In all, there were 99 cases of preventable errors during the study period from July 1, 2003, to October 6, 2004. The report, which was required by a new state law, provides a baseline in measuring a problem that so far has lacked reliable comparisons nationally. There...

Regret The Error reports on corrections, retractions, clarifications, and trends regarding accuracy and honesty in North American media.

Report: Computers Can Add to Errors Computer systems designed to prevent medication errors in hospitals can actually contribute to mistakes, according to a new report. As more hospitals have implemented automated systems for administering drugs, the number of errors associated with them has risen, according to an annual report on medication errors released yesterday by the U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP), a nonprofit group that sets standards for the drug industry. "It would seem logical that applying computer technology to the medication use process would have a significant positive impact in preventing medication errors," said Diane Cousins, vice president of USP's Center...

"The devil made me do it." That age-old excuse for sin, a way to deny personal responsibility for one"s actions, is no longer fashionable. As I wrote in a Creation magazine editorial "Evolution made me do it!" in June 2000, nowadays, whether it"s homosexuality, infidelity or whatever, it"s become, "My genes made me do it." And, because the blind forces of evolution are supposed to be responsible for shaping our genes, that rapidly translates as, "Evolution made me do it". Thus the title of the abovementioned editorial, which pointed to a Time magazine cover story that proclaimed "Infidelity? It"s in...

The paperback version of Lies and the Lying Liars just came out, and Franken did NOT correct SEVERAL errors he haed made in the hardcover? WTF? He continued his assault on O'Reilly and the Levittown issue, even though O'Reilly exhibited the deed from his boyhood home MONTHS ago.

EAGLE, Colo. - With the parents of the alleged victim in the courtroom, the judge in the Kobe Bryant sexual assault case apologized Friday for court mistakes that led to the release of sealed information. During the brief public hearing, District Judge Terry Ruckriegle told the parents he would treat the mistakes as a learning experience. "For all of those who come through these doors, victims and defendants alike, whose names are never known and never sought, I can only assure you I have learned lessons from these mistakes, and that we will give our best human effort not to...

San Francisco-AP -- According to a federal appeals court -- if the California recall election were to take place as scheduled, it would be constitutionally flawed. The court today ordered the postponement of the October seventh vote. The three-judge panel brought back memories of the 2000 presidential election -- in saying that the use of punch-card machines by six counties would cause the results to be challenged in court. The judges in San Francisco wrote that it's "virtually undisputed" that the punch-card systems are much more likely to result in a ballot not being counted. And they said voters in...

The Preludes column on Aug. 17, about causes and effects of long hours on the job, misstated the number of hours that Americans work per week, on average. It is 39, not 49, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Because of an editing error, an article last Sunday about the 1963 civil rights March on Washington referred incorrectly in some copies to a Civil War general to whom one marcher referred in a speech. The general, William T. Sherman, was a Union general, not a Confederate general.

PARIS (Reuters) - Richard Perle, a leading Pentagon (news - web sites) adviser and architect of the U.S. war to topple Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), said the United States had made mistakes in Iraq (news - web sites) and that power should be handed over to the Iraqis as fast as possible. In an interview with the Le Figaro daily newspaper to be published Thursday, Perle defended the U.S.-led war in Iraq and restated his belief that France had been wrong to lead international opposition to the conflict. "Of course, we haven't done everything right," said Perle, according...

On Thursday, August 7 at the end of a column of miscellaneous corrections, the New York Times published this small bombshell: Editors' Note An article on Sunday about attacks on the American military in Iraq over the previous two days, attributed to military officials, included an erroneous account that quoted Pfc. Jose Belen of the First Armored Division. Private Belen, who is not a spokesman for the division, said that a homemade bomb exploded under a convoy on Saturday morning on the outskirts of Baghdad and killed two American soldiers and their interpreter. The American military's central command, which releases...

I hereby issue a public challenge to the New York Times. When is the "newspaper of record" going to run a correction of Paul Krugman's egregious mathematical error in which he claimed, in his August 1 column, that growth in real per capita California state spending from $1,950 in 1990 to $2,211 in 2003 was "only 10%," when anyone with a pocket calculator can tell that it is really 13.4 percent? And when will it correct Krugman's flatly deceptive claim that this growth "was simply a matter of keeping up with the population and inflation," when calculations of real per...

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"/> May 11, 2003 Witnesses and Documents Unveil Deceptions in a Reporter's WorkBy THE NEW YORK TIMES ollowing is an accounting of the articles in which falsification, plagiarism and similar problems were discovered in a review of articles written by Jayson Blair, a reporter for The New York Times who resigned May 1. The review, conducted by a team of Times reporters and researchers, concentrated on the 73 articles Mr. Blair wrote since late October, when he was given roving national assignments and began covering major news events including the Washington-area sniper attacks and...

BOSTON – Surgical teams accidentally leave clamps, sponges and other tools inside about 1,500 patients nationwide each year, according to the biggest study of the problem yet. The mistakes largely result not from surgeon fatigue, but from the stress arising from emergencies or complications discovered on the operating table, the researchers reported.It also happens more often to fat patients, simply because there is more room inside them to lose equipment, according to the study.Both the researchers and several other experts agreed that the number of such mistakes is small compared with the roughly 28 million operations a year in the...

Last evening I saw a glaring example of a difference between the print media and electronic journalism. In a story on Mayor Richard Daley’s hospitalization, a local television reporter stated it was necessitated by several factors, including the Chicago mayor’s "being nauseous." My fellow nitpickers will hastily note the wrong word was used. As pointed out in Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (Third Edition), nauseous means "sickening to contemplate." Now it’s very possible that Mr. Daley was and is in fact nauseous, as least to Republicans who live in Chicago. All three dozen of them. But that isn’t...

At first, the explosive e-mail was quoted as, "Close a bigger deal to hide the loss.” Then it was corrected by Salon.com to read, "Close a bigger deal. Hide the loss before the 1Q.” Then it became the basis for a New York Times op-ed blast that Army Secretary and former Enron executive Thomas White had drafted the e-mail as part of covering up a financial scandal at the energy giant. Now the allegations about cover-up have been retracted from one online news service – but the New York Times arrogantly won’t fess up to its errors. This week, Salon.com...

Studies of Soot Pollution Were Flawed BALTIMORE, Maryland, June 6, 2002 (ENS) - New rules governing emissions of fine soot particles could be delayed due to problems with several studies linking the pollutants to health risks. Earlier this week, scientists at Johns Hopkins University revealed that the computer program they used to analyze their data regarding the potential health effects of exposure to small particle pollution contained a glitch that caused the researchers to report an inflated risk of death from breathing sooty air. Using a corrected program to review their own data, the Johns Hopkins researchers now say...

ROCK HILL, S.C. (AP) #151; Parham Jones stood behind a Rite Aid prescription counter at the crossroads of suburban and rural South Carolina, wrapping up a 12-hour shift and a 60-hour work week. It was Feb. 20, 1995 #151; Monday, a pharmacist's busiest day. With phones ringing and customers clamoring, Jones handed the mother of Gabrielle Hundley a bottle labeled ``Ritalin,'' a drug for hyperactivity. But the bottle contained Glynase, a drug diabetics use to lower blood sugar, at 16 times an adult dose. Just two pills sent 8-year-old Gabrielle into a coma. Her blood sugar sank so low that...