Woo to the hoo!

Beatniks and politics

Will Shatner recites Sarah Palin's farewell speech as beat poetry.

Daily Affirmation

That's Senator Smalley to you, Rush!

Taking a Break

So Prop 8 was upheld while I was out of state this weekend. I guess it's nice that "activist judges" didn't overturn "the will of the people".

(Un)fortunately, their judgement doesn't invalidate the 18,000 gay marriages that were performed between the time the CA Supreme Court legalized gay marriage and the will of the people overturned it. This means that the ruling is ripe for a lawsuit by a gay couple citing preferential treatment for another gay couple who chose to get married a few months before they did.

Also, the state Constitution still allows "civil unions" for gay couples under the equal protection clause of the California Constitution, as long as they don't call their civil unions "marriage". Separate but equal. It's like 1896 all over again.

I predict that gay marriage will become a Statewide and Nationwide institution before the 2010 elections. You can blow out a candle, but you can't blow out a fire.

Goin' to a party

All this talk of tea parties on tax day keeps reminding me of this song by the SAHB.



The king has said he's gonna put a tax on tea
And that's the reason you Americans drink coffee


Just like Alex & Co. these protesters are getting their history wrong. The Tea Act lifted the tax on tea. But the tea partiers in 2009 are also protesting a net tax reduction, so there's an equivalency somewhere.

Jindal vs. the volcano

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (who must have drawn the short straw) in the Republican "response" to Obama's stimulus package. 


Here's his "Councilman Les Whinen" quote

..and $140 million for something called 'volcano monitoring.'
Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington DC.

Snap touche! Why does the government needs to monitor volcanoes? Or tornadoes? Or even.. hurricanes?

If there’s one piece of government stimulus the governor of a state like Louisiana shouldn't mock, it’s early monitoring for natural disasters!

After this stimulus obstruction and the California budget debate, I think it's best for everyone if the Republican party just goes away for awhile.

This side up

Even with the problems with Iraq, Gaza, the economy, and everything else, the President's approval rating skyrocketed from 28% last week to 72% this week. It's like the world has suddenly turned right side up after being upside down for the past eight years!

End of an error

Today is a day of reckoning for millions of bumperstickers, buttons, coffee mugs and t-shirts across the internets. A day they all claimed would happen eventually.

And now it has. Hooray calendar!
And hooray country!

Take me to another place

Inspired by the recent coup in Tennessee's State House ("full of win" as the kids say), here's another good song from 1992.



This single and album swept the 1992 Pazz & Jop poll, but seems to be mostly forgotten nowadays. I traded in the album a few years back, but still cherish my "Tennessee" cassingle!

Revenge of the geeks

In the weeks since the election, I've been slowly weaning myself off political blogs and TV shows. Over the course of a random twenty four hour period in the two months between the convention and the election, I'd keep up with posts on all the standard political sites, and sometimes watch most of MSNBC's triumvirate of Olbermann, Matthews, and Maddow, plus the Daily Show and Colbert Report on Comedy Central. It was almost like having a second full time job!

After the election, I started cutting off the MSNBC shows as well as Jon Stewart, even though I still can't drop the Colbert Report. This is like the political offseason, where there's a bunch of discussion about things that aren't that important, so I've also stopped reading most political blogs, but I'm still regularly checking in to Nate Silver's 538.com. He's even changed their motto from "electoral projections done right" to "politics done right".

Silver's idea to applying his sabermetric analysis to elections was almost as successful in the 2008 election cycle as Barack Obama's campaign. The PECOTA algorithm he developed for Baseball Prospectus is unbelievably accurate in projecting performance of baseball teams (guessing that the Tampa Bay Rays would make the playoffs last year for example), but there was some question whether baseball stats could extend to election polling.

There was some "meta-analysis" during the 2004 election, but it didn't go as deep or make as much impact as 538.com and other sites like Sam Wang's Princeton Election Consortium did in 2008. These sites analyzed the daily polling data in nearly real time to determine the projected win percentages, electoral vote, and popular vote totals for Obama and McCain, and ended up projecting what happened in the actual election.

Sabermetric analysis is often derided by people inside baseball as egghead wankery by geeks in their Mom's basement who probably couldn't hit the curveball. Even when it's practiced by folks like Oakland A's GM Billy Beane who actually played the game. There's a similar prejudice in the political world that these geeks don't know what's really going on -- they're just silly bloggers in their Mom's basement.

Stats have been used with a lot of success inside the sports world (where Bill James is a consultant for the Red Sox, and his sabermetric strategies are still employed by other organizations), but until this year (or perhaps two years ago) political campaigns were still run based on time honored legends and seat of the pants intuition. "Only Big states matter", "Democrats can't win in Virginia", "The Bradley Effect will keep Obama from winning".

When 538.com launched during the Democratic primaries, it was obvious which candidate Nate Silver was supporting (he's a Chicago guy after all), but his model showed no bias. And his objective analysis was just trying to determine who was "ahead" based on who won the latest caucus or primary, but who stood the best chance to win the big contest in November. They determined that Hillary Clinton had no chance long before anyone else did, and that John McCain was on shaky ground, when many experts (including comments here) thought he was sure to win.

538's greatest achievement after the election was throwing a wrench at the meme that California's Prop 8 passed on the backs of Obama's new African-American voters. One exit poll claimed that 75% of AAs "supported" Prop 8, therefore CA's homophobia was all caused by black folks. QED. I was upset by these theories for many reasons, but they all ran out of gas after Silver's post one week after the election showed how misguided that theory was. Statistics don't really "disprove" anything, but they do show that certain things are unlikely, like 6% of the population being responsible for anything based on an unscientific sampling of 6% of that 6% (around 0.36% of the voters).

There's also been lots of analysis of the recounts and runoffs in Alaska, Minnesota, and Georgia on 538.com, as well as interesting stories about Nate's adventures interviewing right wing hacks like John Ziegler. I wasn't sure what would become of that site after the election, but it seems like it's found a niche in the post-election world as "politics done right". Score one for the geeks!

Spidermap

A countywide cartogram of 2008 electoral votes.



My favorite comment from the wonkette post where I found this is
"Put it back on the grill, there’s still red bits on the inside"!

Post-election withdrawl

Five Winners:
1. Obama's Davids (Plouffe and Axelrod)
2. MLK's Dream
3. Howard Dean's 50 state strategy
4. Fivethirtyeight.com
5. U.S. Americans

Five Losers:
1. John McCain
2. Sarah Palin
3. Joe the Plumber
4. Karl Rove Right Wing Politics
5. Marriage Equality in CA

Predicting the future

ARG's Dick Bennett, talking about Nate Silver of 538.com in the New York Times.

He hasn’t been able to predict the future.

He hasn't? Here's yesterday's Final pre-election projection from 538.

Our model projects that Obama will win all states won by John Kerry in 2004, in addition to Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, Florida and North Carolina, while narrowly losing Missouri and Indiana. These states total 353 electoral votes. Our official projection, which looks at these outcomes probabilistically -- for instance, assigns North Carolina's 15 electoral votes to Obama 59 percent of the time -- comes up with an incrementally more conservative projection of 348.6 electoral votes.

We also project Obama to win the popular vote by 6.1 points; his lead is slightly larger than that in the polls now, but our model accounts for the fact that candidates with large leads in the polls typically underperform their numbers by a small margin on Election Day.

And here are the actual votes (with NC's 11 EVs still on the table)

Barack Obama 63,764,326 (52.4%) (349 EVs)
John McCain 56,324,856 (46.3%) (169 EVs)

For a popular vote difference of 6.1% and an electoral vote spread of 349-169. The only state Nate got wrong was Indiana.

That's a scarily accurate projection of the electoral and popular vote, but John McCain's win percentage is still at 1.1% and I still won't rest until it's updated to 0.0%!

One Day More

I've been waiting two months to post this.

Three More Days

fivethirtyeight.com currently shows John McCain with a 3.8% chance to win the election.  This sounds like a done deal, but I won't rest easy until his win percentage drops to 0.0%, which probably won't happen for three more days.  

I can't wait to start resting easy! In three more days,  Nate Silver might have to go back to writing about baseball.   Or maybe he'll start handicapping the 2012 Presidential race on 11/5/08?  

Tuesday PALINdrome

                            Wasilla's all I saw!

The history book on the shelf repeats itself again

John McCain was on "Meet The Press" this morning, live from Waterloo ( as in Iowa). He's a big Abba fan, so I'm sure he's aiming for a repeat of Eurovision in 1974 instead of Napoleon in 1815.



On the other side of the race, here's Joe Biden having to correct some crazy TV host in Florida concerned that "Barack Obama will turn America into a Socialist country, much like Sweden"(?) Why is Florida still allowed to be a state? I think Bugs Bunny had the right idea!

World Series game three

It's on! First pitch at 10:07pm EDT.


I'm visiting my parents in East California this weekend. Tried to go see Obama's in Reno this morning, but traffic and security didn't cooperate. There were about 15 thousand people at the UNR baseball stadium (capacity under five thousand), so it would have been one of those "blessed are the cheesemakers"-type events anyway.

On the bright side, the swing state of Nevada seems to be swinging toward enlightenment in the last ten days of this election cycle.

Undecided

David Sedaris on undecided voters..

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

The most interesting thing about the glut of national polls (for me) is to watch the "undecided" number trickle down as the election gets closer, and X+Y slowly approaches 100. In the Presidential race, the "undecided" number is around 3 to 4%, so there are still people in this election asking how the chicken is cooked.

But not many. The "win percentage" chart on fivethirtyeight.com now looks like a giant blue pie with a tiny sliver of red, and the tiny sliver of red goes all to 270 in the "Electoral vote distribution".   The seal is definitely meeting the deal in the 2008 Presidential race. 

Now I'm more concerned about 538's polling for California's Prop 8, which looks like a Jesus-fish, with the "yes" votes catching up in recent polls. Granting gays the right to marry and then revoking it is probably the cruelest thing California could ever do. If basic civil rights can be denied by a popular vote, it's probably better to never grant them in the first place. The undecideds are still at 8 to 10%, so there are still a lot of CA voters asking how the chicken is cooked.

Barbara Lee continues to speak for me

I got this email from Obama For America today.

Dear Steven,

You can change politics in this country at every level -- up and down the ballot.

Our records show that you live in California's 9th district.

There's a candidate in California who's working to bring the change this country needs, and that candidate is Barbara Lee. Get involved and help bring change now.

  Congresswoman Barbara Lee for Congress: 
  Visit the website

Don't wait until Election Day to support Congresswoman Lee. Get involved today to make sure California has a strong representative to take our country in a new direction.

Thanks,

Obama for America

It's impressive that the Obama campaign knows that I'm in the 9th district, because congressional borders are kind of flaky around here. I used to be in the 13th district (Pete Stark's district), but got moved to the 9th before the 2002 election after Barbara gave her principled opposition against the AUMF in the 437-1 vote.

I voted for her then and voted for her in this Election, but Barbara Lee doesn't need my help to get re-elected. I live in one of the most Democratic districts in the country, where John Kerry won 85% of the vote in the 2004 election, and Barack Obama will probably win 90% of the vote in this election. And Barbara Lee will win 80% of the vote and get re-elected to another term. Like she always does.

One reason I chose to register as an Independent instead of a Democrat is that kept getting called about canvassing for Pete Stark or Barbara Lee when there wasn't any point because they might as well unopposed. My state senator, Alberto Torrico, is the Majority Leader and also isn't in any danger, so it's hard for me to be politically engaged at a local or state level with the same candidates continuing to win overwhelmingly. 

If the Obama campaign is sending this to everyone on their list, it should open up a lot of down-ballot races in other parts of the country. I'm especially interested in my parents district (CA-04) where Democratic challenger Charlie Brown (a good man) is running neck and neck against Republican Tom McClintock (a bad man). I wish I could convert my vote to a district like that where it might matter.