As I’m sure you’ve heard, the McCain campaign, having run out of ideas, has chosen to denigrate Barack Obama as a big celebrity. I submit for your consideration the IMDB pages for John McCain and Barack Obama.
For more, see Andrew Sullivan on McCain’s celebrity.
The Wall Street Journal has issued a correction for its stupid “Is Obama too fit to be President” story that I linked to the other day.
Craig Newmark explains why it’s important for our next President to be Internet literate.
Ever wonder how reporters research their stories? Here’s Amy Chozick of the Wall Street Journal looking for interview subjects for today’s “Is Obama too skinny?” story on Yahoo’s message boards. I didn’t think it was possible to suck this badly.
Andrew Leonard on the housing bailout bill that President Bush just signed:
Without any hoopla, President Bush signed the 2008 Housing and Economic Recovery Act at 7 a.m. Wednesday. The lack of celebration was understandable. The new bill puts taxpayers at so much potential risk that Congress had to simultaneously authorize raising the statutory ceiling on the national debt by $800 billion just to make sure it will have breathing room to make good on its new promises. The message from the White House: Big government just got a whole lot bigger.
And here, in one paragraph, is why libertarianism will never be a mainstream political movement in the United States:
In other words, it’s the kind of bill that the heirs of Ronald Reagan have been decrying for more than a quarter century. Too bad for them: The new bill is all the proof America needs to show that when push comes to shove, no American administration, even one as willfully stubborn and reality-challenged as the current White House, will keep its faith in letting the free market handle its own problems while all else fails.
From Matthew Yglesias:
It seems that a commercial flight pays $2,014 in taxes to fly from New York to Miami, whereas a private jet only pays $236 even though the impact on air traffic control is the same.
Amanda Simon is blogging the debate over the amendments to the FISA bill for the ACLU. This is a tough one to take, and honestly I don’t expect the next President to make things any better regardless of who it is. Here’s Gore Vidal in September 2000:
You have two candidates. Gore is by far the better trained and more intelligent and is going to win. It’s as simple as that. But I worry because he, too, is funded by corporate America. Luckily he’s intelligent and will hopefully turn out pretty well. But what I’m concerned about is how the corruption of the system has become totally accepted. This can be changed by an act of Congress, but no one will be propose it.
Will it happen? No burglar who ever reached the second floor ever kicked the ladder away.
That last sentence is one that has come to mind frequently in the years since. Vidal’s incorrect prediction that Al Gore would win stings a bit, too.
Here’s Glenn Greenwald on today’s events:
Rather, the insultingly false claims about this bill — it brings the FISA court back into eavesdropping! it actually improves civil liberties! Obama will now go after the telecoms criminally! Government spying and lawbreaking isn’t really that important anyway! — are being disseminated by the Democratic Congressional leadership and, most of all, by those desperate to glorify Barack Obama and justify anything and everything he does. Many of these are the same people who spent the last five years screaming that Bush was shredding the Constitution, that spying on Americans was profoundly dangerous, that the political establishment did nothing about Bush’s lawbreaking.
It’s been quite disturbing to watch them turn on a dime — completely reverse everything they claimed to believe — the minute Obama issued his statement saying that he would support this bill. They actually have the audacity to say that this bill — a bill which Bush, Cheney and the entire GOP eagerly support, while virtually every civil libertarian vehemently opposes — will increase the civil liberties that Americans enjoy, as though Dick Cheney, Mike McConnell and “Kit” Bond decided that it was urgently important to pass a new bill to restrict presidential spying and enhance our civil liberties. How completely do you have to relinquish your critical faculties at Barack Obama’s altar in order to get yourself to think that way?
How did Barack Obama go from saying this on January 28:
Ever since 9/11, this Administration has put forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand.
The FISA court works. The separation of powers works. We can trace, track down and take out terrorists while ensuring that our actions are subject to vigorous oversight, and do not undermine the very laws and freedom that we are fighting to defend.
No one should get a free pass to violate the basic civil liberties of the American people — not the President of the United States, and not the telecommunications companies that fell in line with his warrantless surveillance program. We have to make clear the lines that cannot be crossed.
To saying this on June 20:
It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives — and the liberty — of the American people.
Talking Points Memo has a collection of Barack Obama’s statements on the subject. Glenn Greenwald has also been all over this issue.
Update: Barack Obama responded directly to his critics on his blog today. I continue to disagree with his rationale for supporting the compromise but I’m somewhat pleased that he’s engaging with his critics. Be sure to read Glenn Greenwald’s analysis of Obama’s statement. I agree with every red flag he raises.
One issue that’s been percolating in the Presidential election is the fact that John McCain isn’t an Internet user. For example, here’s former John Edwards blogger Tracy Russo questioning McCain aide Mark Soohoo yesterday on the subject.
The original event that led people to start questioning the idea of having an Internet-illiterate President was McCain’s statement on this video from a few months ago that he doesn’t use a computer. Matthew Yglesias weighed in on this matter today.
It’s tempting to apply George W. Bush’s famous soft bigotry of low expectations and assume that McCain’s an old guy, and old guys just aren’t computer users. However, I have an anecdote that should undermine that assumption.
Back in 1997 I worked for an IT consulting firm that built Web sites, set up email systems, designed networks, and so forth. One of our clients was the George Bush Presidential library in College Station, Texas. The company was responsible for setting up the LAN for the library, getting email up and running, and so forth. One of the tasks on that project was setting up email accounts for President Bush and his friends (folks like Brent Scowcroft), generating PGP keys, and teaching them how to use them.
President Bush has a good 12 years on John McCain, and he had his own laptop, email account, and PGP key ten years ago. He even had his own humorous domain name, which I won’t divulge for the sake of the former President’s privacy. (I checked it out in whois not long ago and he’s still the owner.)
If President Bush was handling his own email a decade ago even though he has staffers who can take care of that sort of thing for him, why isn’t John McCain doing it now? I find it troubling when anyone isn’t be curious enough about this whole Internet thing to try it out in this day and age. It’s kind of a big deal.
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Sports statistics analysts take over the world
Somehow, Nate Silver’s political Web site escaped my notice until today. Silver is using the same techniques he and other used in building improved baseball statistics to analyze the performance of pollsters in 2008 elections, and to aggregate multiple polls into an accurate prediction of voter behavior.
The site provides a lot of interesting numbers, including the odds of various scenarios occurring, like “Obama wins all Kerry states” and “McCain loses OH/MI, wins election.” The site also provides return on investment rankings for the states, and the individual chance of the candidates winning each state.
The reason this post has the subject it does, though, is that it’s fun to watch sports analysis go mainstream. Sports analysis is a perfect training ground for statistical analysis because of the discrete raw statistics that can be used, and the fact that predictions can very easily be compared to actual results.
Most sports analysis comes down to a simple question, “Which things help teams win?” So if I’m a football analyst, I may argue that average time of possession better predicts winning than average margin of victory. I can then process the historical data for as many seasons of football as I like and test that argument. It doesn’t matter how beautiful my theory is, the data will quickly show whether I’m right or wrong.
It’s not surprising to me to see people who have cut their teeth in the world of sports analysis start applying their methods to other areas. The numbers may be different, but the discipline is the same. Silver is doing with polling numbers and election results what he did before with batting averages and baseball games.
If nothing else, it makes me feel like all of the time I’ve spent reading about quantitative analysis of sports hasn’t been a total waste.
If you’re into this sort of analysis, there’s also the Princeton Election Consortium, which posted a mild critique of Silver’s methodology. And for a more naive analysis that just looks at the latest poll result for each state, see electoral-vote.com.