A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth

The Wall Street Journal offers an opinion piece from Michael Stokes Paulsen stating that the Minnesota election of Al Franken is unconstitutional, based on Bush vs Gore (2000). I don’t have any strong opinion on whether Franken or Coleman should be declared winner, not having followed all of the shenanigans. However, there are two things that spring out from the article. The first is that Paulsen ignores the fact that the Supreme Court said that “Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances…”, and was not to be used as prededent.

E-mail spam statistics

The WSJ has an informative article on spam that has some actual statistics. In particular, a typical response rate is 0.0023%, and the scum can make a profit with response rates as low as 0.001%.