It’s the time of year when people take stock.  One of the things I did today was to review the traffic to my blog–something I don’t do very often, probably because I don’t know what to do with the information.

I learned that from February through December of 2008 (January’s data looks like it has already been purged) this website received 1,580,340 page views.  I don’t know how many of those are repeat visitors, but in the site’s busiest month there were over 50,000 unique visitors.

This brings up two points:

First:  THANKS!  I don’t know who all you people are, but thanks for stopping by to view my ramblings.  Don’t let my increasingly infrequent posting give you the mistaken impression that I don’t appreciate you being out there.  I do.  But as you all know, sometimes life gets in the way.  And sometimes you just don’t feel like posting–like after an overly long election season, that quite frankly even though my guy lost, I’m just relieved is finally over.  Thank you all. 

Thanks especially to folks like Glenn Reynolds, K-Lo and J-Go, and James Taranto, who are probably responsible for most of the traffic here.  But equal thanks also goes out to all the other bloggers who have linked here in the past year including Ace, ACK, The Anchoress, Bill Hobbs, Clint Brewer, Dean Esmay, Digital Nicotine, Don Surber, K-Co, MCO, Michael Silence, Michelle Malkin, The Moores, Phil Carter, PowerLine, RedState, Roger Abramson, SayUncle, Sean Braisted, Snowflakes in Hell, Tom Maguire, VolAbroad, Webutante, and my Lib Dem Councillor friend, as well as many, many others.

Second:  The bleg:  Is this a lot of blog traffic?  A little?  Is there any money in this sort of thing?  If so, what next?

UPDATE:

Thanks again to Glenn for the link, and thanks for coming over from Instapundit if that’s how you got here.  Check out the rest of the site to see if it’s something you like.  Thanks also for the comments I’m getting on this question.

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Pejman Yousefzadeh lays out a compelling case for why Roland Burris must be seated in the United States Senate. We have already given Washington far too much power; how much more dangerous it would be for the people to cede to the incumbency veto over the ballot. That is what is at stake here. While Burris has not been elected, he is no less constitutionally and legally a United States Senator than if he were.

Yousefzadeh’s position is that the relevant Constitutional section “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members” gives the body only the power to judge members on their qualifications. That is, that the member has “attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall . . . when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen,” are the only qualifications that the Senate is empowered to consider.

The Tennessee Constitution proscribes a similar power for its legislative body:

The senate and house of representatives, when assembled, shall . . . be judges of the qualifications and election of its members.

Three years ago the Tennessee State Senate exercised its authority when a special election to replace one of its members was decided by thirteen votes, but an investigation found well over a hundred illegally cast votes (most of which were apparently cast for the “winner”.) The election result was determined to be “incurably uncertain” and the apparent winner was unseated until a new election was held (which she later won). I happened to be among those who argued that she should not be unseated since I am loathe to ignore the actions of the electorate. However, it was never in question that the Tennessee Senate was properly exercising its constitutional authority to judge the election of one of its members when it voted to undo the election.

Roland Burris is constitutionally qualified to be a U.S. Senator, and absent evidence of a quid pro quo appointment, his appointment is lawful. Sadly, it appears that this appointment may be the only lawful thing Governor Blagojevich has done during his term of office.

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If he gets it, this may give the NetRoots something to get in a froth about . . . something other than Barack Obama leaving them like they were an ugly prom date.

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For those in the Middle Tennessee area, I am delivering a speech today at a luncheon of the Nashville Republican Women’s Club.  It is at Richland Country Club at 1130 1100 if anyone is interested in attending.

Long ago I was booked to address the current situation in Iraq.  My remarks will be similar to what I wrote for Pajamas Media last month.  However, I’m sure that the subject of the election and the Republican Party’s future direction will also be on the agenda.  I expect also to hear some discussion about the incredible successes of the Tennessee Republican Party, which for the first time EVER, controls both houses of the state legislature.  Something is going right in Tennessee that the national GOP should learn from.

Hope to see you there.

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“An entire army of extremely energetic, insufferably annoying, mindless pawns”

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

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Of the 23 national polls predicting the final popular vote count, eight of the ten worst estimates came from media-sponsored polls, while none of the top-five closest polls were affiliated with a media organization.

I have a theory as to why this is.  Consider the news coverage of this presidential election.  How much coverage of issues did you see?  How much in-depth investigative reporting was there?  Not much.  Well, except for reports of Sarah Palin’s family.  But seriously, what major news organization researched and reported on the collective body of Barack Obama’s votes in the Illinois State Senate?  I don’t remember seeing it.  Nor had I seen any similar report about John McCain’s quarter-century in Washington. 

What we saw instead was a whole lot of horse race coverage.  And I think that the reason for that is that it is much cheaper.  Hiring a good investigative reporter, and putting him on an expense account (you’d be amazed how much a journalist can charge while he’s out of town) so that he can dig into years of legislative records and talk with former colleagues and lobbyists, is a very expensive endeavor.  To do all that in order to produce–if you’re lucky–two stories after two weeks of investigation costs tens of thousands of dollars.  Buying into a poll is a lot cheaper and you’re guaranteed a new story every few days.  But it’s not reporting.

So how does that explain why the media polls got it so wrong?  Simple.  You get what you pay for and what the media demanded was quick-result polls that didn’t cost much.  They wanted to report every morning the results of a poll concluded the previous night.  I’ve done a little bit of polling work before.  It is difficult to scrub the data for outliers and check it against detailed stratifications that quickly.  To save the media money the polling organizations cut corners.  They made assumptions that they then didn’t go back and re-test, they accepted far too many non-responses without adequate follow-ups, and they simply automated the results without installing enough human checks in the system to see if the results made sense.  Humans cost money and take time, neither of which was something the media wanted.

In order to cut costs, the media stopped doing their traditional jobs and produced pre-packaged polling material instead.  Not only did they get it wrong, their declining circulation numbers show the ultimate result.

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Putin plots his return to the Kremlin.

If Obama wants to send a signal to the world that he’s serious about his pledge, “To those who would tear this world down – we will defeat you,” he should to return John Bolton to his former post as Ambassador to the United Nations.

It would make a whole lot of McCain-voting Republicans breathe a big sigh of relief and would probably extend his 100-day holiday.

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If any Republican group or prominent conservative individual, from a county GOP club to a radio host, gives this kind of impeachment talk any sort of credence whatsoever, I would advise you to buy Obama reelection stock on InTrade.  Keep this sort of thing out on the fringes–you know, among people who live on “compounds,” and that sort of thing.

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A little late, but still good:

(ht: BM)

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The Dow is down 500 today.  Honestly, I’m surprised that it fell that much since I assumed that much of the decline we’ve seen in the last month was because of an expected Obama victory.  There must have been 500 points worth of stubborn people like me still out there.

What will surprise me is if the market rises significantly any time between now and December 31.  Anything that pushes up the market momentarily will probably be reversed by a desire to sell at the higher price before the end of the year in order to avoid expected increases in capitol gains taxes.

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