Politics
gregladen | November 23, 2008Here's the graph:
The explanation for the graph is here.
This is a little misleading. The number of votes counted yesterday and contributing to this right-most point is very small ... hardly any counting was going on during the day Saturday. The Monday data, added to this, will be more useful. (In fact, some of you may have noticed, that while this graph is fun, there are major violations going on here statistically ... which is why there is no R-squared or p value being given!)
I've changed the Republican Party Line to be a third order polynomial for maximum absurdity.
See this post…
gregladen | November 23, 2008I once read a novel by John Le Carre about Inguhetia (Our Game). For quite some time, if I mentioned Ingushetia to anyone they assumed I was making it up. But it is quite real. You've heard recently of the problems in Georgia vis-a-vis South Ossetia. Well, Ingushetia is nestled along side of North Ossetia. It is part of Russia.
And now ...
Human rights activists and opposition politicians in Russia's southern republic of Ingushetia have told the BBC that the predominantly Muslim region is now in a state of civil war.
It is reported that more than 800 people have been killed in an…
clock | November 22, 2008NYTimes:
Eliminating daylight time would thus accord with President-elect Barack Obama's stated goals of conserving resources, saving money, promoting energy security and reducing climate change.
Eugene Sandhu:
In order to conserve energy, President-elect Barak Obama should eliminate daylight saving time.
Boing Boing:
President-elect Obama wants to get rid of daylight saving time in the United States to conserve energy.
The game of broken telephones? Or lack of reading comprehension, or just wishful thinking? I though we were the Reality-Based Community.
More....
clock | November 22, 2008Last week, Terry Gross interviewed William Ayers on Fresh Air on NPR - you can listen to the podcast here.
James Fallows and Dave Winer have completely opposite reactions to the interview. What do you think?
gregladen | November 22, 2008This is hyst-fucking-erical.
OK, we've been recounting ballots pursuant to the implementation of actual Democracy in the Coleman-Franken race for U.S. Senate.
So what do you think the standard JOKE among the Democrats ... working as volunteers to observe the count for Franken ... has been? This:
"I challene this ballot because the voter filled in the bubble for Norm Coleman. Obviously, this voter is delusional."
Ha ha ha. Well, even if it is not the funniest joke you've ever heard, it IS a joke. Right?
Right?
Well, no, not if you are a Republican. The Coleman challengers have…
pharyngula | November 22, 2008The Bush administration will leave us with another legacy: unqualified Republican ideologues receiving appointments in various institutions, including scientific organizations, as their ship of state sinks. The rats are scuttling overboard, and are being rewarded with captaincies on any available vessel. An article in the Washington post discusses the trend. I thought these were striking examples.
In one recent example, Todd Harding -- a 30-year-old political appointee at the Energy Department -- applied for and won a post this month at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.…
illconsidered | November 21, 2008I received this via unsolicited email and thought it important analysis to share:
Stunning Break with Last Eight Years
In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.
Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama's appearance on CBS' "Sixty Minutes" on Sunday witnessed the president-elect's unorthodox verbal tick, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth. But Mr.…
evolvingthoughts | November 20, 2008
Frederick Toben is an awful man, who denies the plain fact that the Nazis killed six million Jews and between nine and eleven million Jews, Slavs, Romany, homosexuals, Soviets (civilians and POWs), Poles, disabled, and so on.
But what he thinks is not a crime, either in Australia, where he lives, or in the United Kingdom, where he was arrested on a German warrant for breaking German laws. And it was right that he was released by the British courts. If people can be arrested and charged for breaking laws online in jurisdictions where they do not reside, no matter how awful their views are,…
clock | November 20, 2008Politicians persuaded to save Canada boreal forest:
Politicians actually listened when experts told them to protect Canada's boreal forest, a potent weapon against global warming, and the plan for this vast green area could work on some of the world's other vital places, scientists told Reuters.
---------------
Jeremy Kerr, a biogeographer at the University of Ottawa, said he and other scientists were surprised and delighted that Canadian politicians have been persuaded by science.
More info...
clock | November 20, 2008The Economist:
But the odds in favour of an imminent renaissance look long. Many conservatives continue to think they lost because they were not conservative or populist enough--Mr McCain, after all, was an amnesty-loving green who refused to make an issue out of Mr Obama's associations with Jeremiah Wright. Richard Weaver, one of the founders of modern conservatism, once wrote a book entitled "Ideas have Consequences"; unfortunately, too many Republicans are still refusing to acknowledge that idiocy has consequences, too.
Politico:
That there is no simple solution for what ails the party is…
gregladen | November 20, 2008
http://www.2012draftsarahcommittee.com/
here
Click on "straw poll" in the sidebar.
drorzel | November 20, 2008I flagged this Matt Yglesias post about post-mortem examinations of the financial crisis as something to respond to. Matt writes:
I was at an interesting discussion with an ideologically diverse group of people last night of the future of financial regulations. One thing that there was broad agreement on that hadn't really snapped into focus for me previously is the idea that doing rigorously precise forensic work on how to understand "what went wrong" and then design the rule that would have prevented this is neither necessary nor sufficient to improving things going further.
The basic…
illconsidered | November 20, 2008A Few Things Ill Considered is just as happy as the next vile, hate-spewing, far left smear machine that Barack Obama actually won the recent US Presidential election, but I have to say I am so ready to be really disappointed!
Call me a cynic, but we've had progress waved under our noses before, only to have it snatched away by spineless, self-serving Democratic congress people and the harsh reality that the real power structures in the US are not all elected officials.
Nevertheless, when it comes to tackling climate change, the signs are really hopeful, even if the challenge is enormous.
I…
oracknows | November 19, 2008I realize this story is a week old, but it's something I wanted to do a quick blog post on, and what better excuse than to get it done before tomorrow's Skeptics' Circle? Looking at a list of The 50 facts you might not know about Barack Obama, I found out that I share quite a few interests with our President-Elect. For example:
He collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics
I find it way cool that our new President collects comics. Until recently, I collected Spider-Man comics too; that is, until the writers decided to ruin the comic with a Brand New Day storyline that "rebooted" the…
jstemwedel | November 19, 2008There are some newspaper stories that must be pretty easy to write at this point because it seems like they're essentially the same year in and year out. California is having another budget crisis, and the Californians who are going to take it in the teeth are students -- especially students in the California State University (CSU) system, to which the university that employs me belongs.
Once again, budget shortfalls at the state level mean enrollments will be capped at the 23 campuses in the CSU system. Practically, this means 10,000 or so qualified applicants will be turned away. In…
clock | November 18, 2008...and the journalism that can help. Jay Rosen and Conor Friedersdorf on Blogginheads.tv:
jrosenhouse | November 18, 2008Have you ever seen George Will do his schtick on some chat show or other and then start wondering if maybe he's just making stuff up? Wonder no more!
On This Week this past Sunday Will was on with New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman. The following exchange took place:
GEORGE WILL: Sam, one of the ways we turned a depression into the Great Depression that didn't end until the Japanese fleet appeared off Hawaii was that there were no rules and investors went on strike because the government was completely improvising. Net investment was negative through almost all of…
gregladen | November 18, 2008And the winner is ......
Democrat Mark Begich called winner over Ted Stevens. The count is still on, but MSNCB is reporting that AP is calling the race. A recount could be requested.
Now, everything is ruined for Sarah Palin.
tqa | November 18, 2008
I wrote a post a few weeks ago about the role that the Community Reinvestment Act played (or, rather, did not play) in causing the current global financial meltdown. I was planning to get out of the issue there, but a really nice article by Devilstower over at Daily Kos sucked me back in. During the time when I wasn't paying any attention to the issue, the right wing noise machine added a new villain to their attempts to blame Wall Street's mess on the left: ACORN.
In 1977 Democratic President Jimmy Carter passed the Community Reinvestment Act to provide housing to poor people. In the…
razib | November 18, 2008Andrew Gelman has a post up which reports an analysis of the votes for Obama by county as a function of the black percentage. In chart below the circles are counties where size is proportional to turnout.
Click here for a larger version.