Thursday, April 8, 2010

Former Mayor, MBS CEO Bob Pugh blasts Columbia Heart Beat

COLUMBIA, 4/8/10  (Beat Byte)  --  Talk about a sore winner!
 
Former Columbia Mayor and MBS Books CEO Bob Pugh -- whose earlier involvement in a discussion about plans to "oust" so-called "activist Columbia City Council members" was widely reported, sent this missive blasting the Heart Beat:  

"Nice job on your City Council and Safety Camera polling results.   Zero for four.

"In the future maybe you should indicate your margin of error, or better yet, give up trying make people think you are an objective analyst of public opinion.


"For instance:

"You missed McDavid by 20%. Wade by  8%. Sullivan by 18%.. Kespohl by 9%. Skala by 8%.Greever-Rice by 12%. Read by 10%. Dudley by 8%.Yes on cameras by 20%.


"I am not a statistician but calculating the average of your misses, yields a margin of error of 13%.  


"You brag that your polling is much imitated  and not as subject to multiple voting. Nice try. Your polling yielded exactly the results you wanted in order to support your high-minded, silly rhetoric

"Both are not worth the powder to blow them to hell."
 
Bob Pugh
bpugh@mbsbooks.com
573-446-5225


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12 comments:

  1. Rumor has it that Bob Pugh sent an email message to his management-level employees a couple of weeks ago suggesting who he would vote for based on specific race and encouraged them to do so too - for the good of 'their' business. It was definitely perceived as a threat, to the extent that employees felt like they could not publicly align themselves with specific campaigns.

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  2. The last line was pretty funny.

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  3. I'm waiting for text books to go totally digital and MBS can have their own book burning in the parking lot. They have been making an outrageous profit off used books for years. They better be thinking outside the box now.

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  4. Bob Pugh must not be much of a businessman, or he would realize that using the company letterhead for things such as this is bad for business. I am a professor and plan on telling my students to find their books on the internet. As a matter of fact, I will search for them.

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  5. These guys are class acts, all right. Continuing to bash their opposition pretty much all over town days after the election is over and they supposedly won.

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  6. I mean, he's right. Your polls were really off.

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  7. I love when someone's own words show their true character.

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  8. You can certainly make the argument this was a petty move by Mr. Pugh, but he is correct in stating your "predictions" were pretty much uniformly incorrect.

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  9. It amazes me that people are still trying to push an agenda, this long after the election, by posting nonsense all over town.

    I'm reading these polls and I come to a completely different conclusion. "Uniformly incorrect?"

    Not hardly. They missed the two ward races and the cameras. They predicted who would win mayor and school board and didn't make predictions on the school bonds.

    Those ward races also had strange results, completely flipping in favor of the worst candidates money can buy in the last hour of the vote count. How were the votes counted? Was anyone there monitoring what was happening?
    Was anything recounted?

    If no one in the general public can answer these questions, shouldn't we know what went on, especially with such close counts?

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  10. Looks like we have quite of few monied interest trying to convince Columbians that money had nothing to do with it.

    http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2010/04/09/letter-voters-had-right-idea-not-george-kennedy/

    David Nuelle is the owner of Primerica Financial Services here in Columbia, Mo.

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  11. The CMDC boys and their co-conspirators want it all this time. They spent a ton of money using multiple and expensive strategies to influence/throw the elections and they expect a lot as their ROI. They want to be able to destroy their opponents and then defile the bodies after they've won, while demanding to be treated as if they behaved in an ethical fashion. Nobody needs to hide their eye glasses yet, but it was definitely a step in direction of corruption and incivility.

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  12. Off-elections, which this one definitely is, have low voter turn out. Therefore, it does not take much to push the results in any one direction by getting a particular sub-group to show up more.

    So, are polls very accurate in small elections? If it is a dull race, sometimes. If not boring, then harder to predict.

    Did Heartbeat brag a bit about past success? Sure. Life goes on. Is Bob doing it now? Sure. Life goes on.

    Ironies, though:

    * Tying a private corporation to a political wind is a risky move. Keep in mind the political orientation of your typical customers, Bob.

    * The Heartbeat itself is not read equally by all voter segments. So that poll is most accurate when the sub-groups that read the Heartbeat coincides with the sub-groups that are going in greater numbers to the polls.

    Such is life.

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