Message to FR and other Cons who have jumped into bed with Douglas Kaplan from Gravis Working Group

[grantcart]

Last edited Mon Oct 22, 2012, 11:00 AM - Edit history (1)

Edited to add that Kaplan's admission to FR contributor that he had to hire a statistician confirms one of our basic contentions. They are not a professional polling firm and don't have that kind of expertise. Now for Nate and the others to evaluate Gravis they should know who that is because Kaplan has admitted he doesn't have the expertise. BTW Doug every time you open your mouth you give us another nugget. More interviews please.




Regarding the following comment that has been relayed to us from Free Republic

Left-wing bloggers and activists declared war on an independent pollster, who dared to pick up on Romney’s positive momentum, both nationally and in the states.

“I don’t run fake polls,” said Douglas J. Kaplan, who owns Winter Springs, Fla.-based Gravis Marketing, and who has been polling and releasing polls on the presidential election.

“It is ridiculous,” he said. “We have no power. We put out polls.”

“They are trying to shut me down because they think I’m a pro-Romney pollster,” he said. “They said Karl Rove was funding me, I wish I knew Karl Rove.”

We have been contacted by various conservative media who requested an interview.

We still have more to release but we did pass the following on to conservative and right wing media outlets that seemed honestly interested in getting more information;

We expect that many of your questions will be answered by our latest post but that it will raise even more questions. This one paragraph should be of the most interest to you and your people:

quote
One word of caution. We are not finding that there is a strong link between Kaplan and his known associates and the Republican Party, the conservative movement or politics in general. It may be that polling was only part of a wider scope of activities. We still have a great deal of material we are going through.
unquote

While people on the right might still be clinging to Gravis they won't when we are finished and the longer they defend him the sillier they will look. Read his tweets. Read his bios. Try and figure out what college he thinks he really went to. Ask yourself why would a pollster start a PAC?

If you want to understand where this is going then you should start investigating all of the different associates that he has been working with over the last 10 years. These are not the only mugshots that will be attached to the Gravis story.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021579317

I hope that you will note that when we could have written this with a slant that "this is how Republicans act" or "see your typical Republican mug shot" we did not.

This is called comity.

Here is the definition:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/comity?s=t

It doesn't seem to be a word that anyone in the right wing media is familiar with.

regards

The Gravis Working Group at DU.

One of the reasons that it has taken so long is that Kaplan is such a prolific fabricator that we had to take apart one level of lies after another. He lied about who he was, where he studied and what he has been doing. He has no back ground in political science or statistics but is a serial junk fax con man, robo caller that has tried to cash in on the political season and has a long history of FCC violations.

There are other more personal facts that we have become aware of that we could have used to assassinate the character of Mr. Kaplan if we really wanted to 'declare war' on Mr. Kaplan.

He has four strong passions. He is passionate about his son, his dogs, the conviction of Casey Anthony and supporting the State of Israel. His world view isn't sophisticated enough to be linked to a political ideology. Listen to the tapes in our link and you will realize that he has the sophistication of the guy in the booth next to you at Denny's.

We are not trying to 'shut him down'. We are trying to force those that average polls together admit that they really don't have an object professional standard when it comes to choosing which polls to go. Any shutting down won't be done by us but by folks with federal alphabet soup names or State LEOs after the election is over

We have never alleged that he is connected to Karl Rove. Of course the fact that he set up a PAC (an obvious conflict for a pollster) made us wonder if he wasn't either fishing for some of the Koch brother largess or a James O'Keefe III imitator (who he followed on tweeter). His assertion that we alleged a tie to Karl Rove is in fact another lie. Just as he went on Russian English language radio and talked about all of the polls that Gravis was working on, except none were never released until 6 months later when Gravis became the most prolific swing state pollster of the season.

One last challenge for our friends at FR. He has consistently stated that he doesn't have clients for these polls and is doing it on 'his dime'. Now why would a guy facing massive IRS liens and foreclosures be running polls with no avenue of profit? By the way we know that among Kaplan's closest personal friends is a person who seems to be a consistent Obama supporter. He has tweeted some pedestrian statements appearing to support the Affordable Health Care Act and at the same time retweeting charges that Obama is a clandestine Muslim interloper.

For the record we have put out hundreds of facts on Kaplan and his associates and we are not aware of a single fact that has been challenged.

When we have had time to finish going through the mountain of backed up material and we release the final link to Kaplan and other 'alleged' activities that occurred at places where Kaplan was a manager at, and while he was a manager at, you will not be in his corner. We have published a list of people that Kaplan has had a long association with and you don't have to believe us, start running those names through the internet and you may be shocked at the connections you get.

We also believe that the idea that Kaplan is writing proprietary software is another in a long series of untrue self promotions. We believe that the software comes via Predictive Concepts (owned by Miller and Hymel) who have a partnering relationship with PIKA Technologies. Pika Technologies is the industry leader in robo calling hard and software and there several dozen companies that use their product for similar robo calling. Its not a major point, just another example of Kaplans unflagging self promotion from a fellow that has multiple CVs and can't decide which non accredited college he should say he entered.


In your conversation with Kaplan he states that he has hired a statistician.

Well Kaplan uses various social media to link to everyone he does business with. And I mean everyone. He even links to the attorneys that apparently defended him in the prosecution by the FCC.

So we know a lot of his associates and even social friends. We have not been able to identify this mysterious 'statistician' you refer to.

Now we know who Alan Giardinieri is and this is a fairly recent photo that was taken during the time when he is supposed to be working for Gravis:




http://florida.arrests.org/Arrests/Alan_Giardinieri_5811099/

That is not such a flattering picture of Alan so let's use this one instead;



http://mugshots.com/US-Counties/Florida/Seminole-County-FL/Alan-Giardinieri.2779828.html

We know who Ashlee Crosbie is. She is in fact a certified conservative and is registered over at Liberty Link a social site only for true blood conservatives (another cheap shot we could have used if we wanted to unfairly paint Gravis as a primarily consecrative operation but did not)

And we know who Randy Stevens is, the so called project manager. But none of these are qualified statisticians so why doesn't Kaplan reveal who is statistician is.

Now please note when we allege that Gravis Marketing is a Fraud we are not alleging that the calls are not being made, we know that they are. We note that some Gravis polls have published some results that have bordered on the twilight zone. Out of nowhere they have, for example showed Obama was 9 points behind based on the absurd suggestion that only 1 in 4 independents was going to the President (By the way with statistics in North Carolina showing the President's campaign 60,000 voters ahead of 4 years ago we agree with Daily Kos that something 'epic' is happening there. Wouldn't it be something if it was Gravis strange NC poll that got people in NC motivated) There was the strange Michigan poll that was the only one that shows Romney within the MOE. Now what was really odd about that was that Romney has given up in MI so why poll there, especially on your own dime. But it was Gravis CO poll that showed more AA favored Romney than the President that really provoked the laughter. It was such an idiotic result and so roundly laughed at that they turned around and did another one the day after the tabs were released. (BTW during the first part of October Gravis was doing almost a poll a day in the swing states. After we started publishing facts about Kaplan's background it slowed to about one a week.)

In any case its not the polls that are illegitimate but the company (and indeed Kaplan continues to insist that they make no money from the polling, that it is on his own dime). It is his lack of academic, professional and political science background and his self promotion of this as a primarily political marketing company that is a fraud. Kaplan has a 10 year history of running 'alleged' cons (some of which have been prosecuted by state and federal authorities. We don't think that if people understood that they would want to include Gravis in the polling 'club', more of that later.

We will have more latter in the week, we have businesses and professional practices to get back to and phone calls to make to re elect the President. Hey if you want to stand shoulder to shoulder with Doug and Alan, be our guest.

(apologies for any syntax or grammar errors, our eyes are getting tired from reading so many federal filings and mountains of backed up documents.)



Gravis Working Group

[HooptieWagon]

1. More excellent work, grantcart and the Gravis Working Group!

Last edited Mon Oct 22, 2012, 02:44 AM - Edit history (1)

Holy shit, that's a mountain of material you're researching...

[theKed]

6. Seriously.

[grantcart]

7. thanks.

[ProudProgressiveNow]

2. Bravo! K&R

Damn, that's a lot of work. Well done.

[grantcart]

8. thanks

[OldDem2012]

3. Keep it coming! Well done! nt.

[grantcart]

9. thanks

[MuhkRahker]

4. Great, more updates soon to come?

I've been alerting lots of blogs and media folk. Some are showing interest.

[EmeraldCityGrl]

5. The best investigative reporting of the political cycle. Well Done.

[Dalai_1]

10. Great Work, Thank you for the updates!

[Spazito]

11. Thanks for this, grantcart....

The work the Gravis Working Group is doing is excellent!

[alcibiades_mystery]

12. You're really starting to get to these fucking con artists

It's hilarious to watch them squirm.

They run fake polls. They have never, to my knowledge, run a single poll in this election, and anyone who takes the word of these grifters is a sucker of first order, Nate Silver or otherwise.