Pay attention, please. Here’s how it happened:
(1) Sandy allowed Obama to maintain a lead that he’s maintained since June.
(2) It’s all the fault of the “entitlement crowd,” aka the “moocher class,” aka people who love food stamps so much that they actively seek out underpaying jobs or even “funemployment!”
Way to go, hurricane and kids living under the poverty line. Another four years of “fearing for my country.”
{ 0 comments }
The Case for Obama: Why He Is a Great President. Yes, Great.
I decided to support Barack Obama pretty early in the Democratic primary, around spring of 2007. But unlike so many of his supporters, I never experienced a kind of emotional response to his candidacy. I never felt his election would change everything about American politics or government, that it would lead us out of the darkness. Nothing Obama did or said ever made me well up with tears.
Possibly for that same reason, I have never felt even a bit of the crushing sense of disappointment that at various times has enveloped so many Obama voters. I supported Obama because I judged him to have a keen analytical mind, grasping both the possibilities and the limits of activist government, and possessed of excellent communicative talents. I thought he would nudge government policy in an incrementally better direction. I consider his presidency an overwhelming success.
I can understand why somebody who never shared Obama’s goals would vote against his reelection. If you think the tax code already punishes the rich too heavily, that it’s not government’s role to subsidize health insurance for those who can’t obtain it, that the military shouldn’t have to let gays serve openly, and so on, then Obama’s presidency has been a disaster, but you probably didn’t vote for him last time. For anybody who voted for Obama in 2008 and had even the vaguest sense of his platform, the notion that he has fallen short of some plausible performance threshold seems to me unfathomable.
Obama’s résumé of accomplishments is broad and deep, running the gamut from economic to social to foreign policy. The general thrust of his reforms, especially in economic policy, has been a combination of politically radical and ideologically moderate. The combination has confused liberals into thinking of Obamaism as a series of sad half-measures, and conservatives to deem it socialism, but the truth is neither. Obama’s agenda has generally hewed to the consensus of mainstream economists and policy experts. What makes the agenda radical is that, historically, vast realms of policy had been shaped by special interests for their own benefit. Plans to rationalize those things, to write laws that make sense, molder on think-tank shelves for years, even generations. They are often boring. But then Obama, in a frenetic burst of activity, made many of them happen all at once. More…
{ 0 comments }
Great roundup from David Roher:
Nate Silver’s Braying Idiot Detractors Show That Being Ignorant About Politics Is Like Being Ignorant About Sports
In case you haven’t been hanging around the benighted corners of the political internet lately, there’s an idiotic backlash afoot against Nate Silver, the proprietor of the FiveThirtyEight blog who made his name as one of the sharpest baseball analysts around.
With the election just a few days away, analysis based on state poll aggregation—Silver’s included—suggests that Barack Obama is a heavy favorite against Mitt Romney. The president holds a slight but strong lead in key electoral states. This doesn’t sit well with many political pundits, who insist that the outcome is anyone’s guess and headed down to the wire. Many of these people have directed their anger toward Silver, whose New York Times-hosted blog has predicted a strong probability of an Obama victory since June. They insist he is biased or sloppy in his methodology, even though they seem unaware of how he makes his predictions and of statistical analysis in general. They say—and I’m not kidding—he’s too gay for this sort of work.
In retrospect, we should’ve seen it coming. It was only a matter of time before the war on expertise spilled over into the cells of Nate Silver’s spreadsheets. In fact, in some ways it had already. Turns out that nothing could have prepared Silver better for the slings and arrows of a surly and willfully obtuse pundit class than working on the fringes of sportswriting over the past decade… <Continue…>
{ 0 comments }
And Limbaugh responds with something like, “It’s all politics, Brian! What do you think the walk on the beach is?! They should be planning, not walking in front of the cameras!” Which I’m sure resonates with many folks–many folks who are incredibly cynical and assume that there’s no public benefit to (1) the President showing his face in a disaster area or (2) doing so alongside the state’s governor. In Limbaugh’s world, the President does not interact with the world outside his offices.
Plus, Romney bought canned goods to place at his campaign rally in Dayton.
{ 0 comments }
A good rundown of the Sandy-climate change connection from Skeptical Science:
Loading the Dice:
Gillis:
While it’s impossible to say how this scenario might have unfolded if sea-ice had been as extensive as it was in the 1980s, the situation at hand is completely consistent with what I’d expect to see happen more often as a result of unabated warming and especially the amplification of that warming in the Arctic…
Roberts:
There is no division, in the physical world, between “climate change storms” and “non-climate change storms.” Climate change is not an exogenous force acting on the atmosphere. There is only the atmosphere, changing. Everything that happens in a changed atmosphere is “caused” by the atmosphere, even if it’s within the range of historical variability.
Lewandowsky:
Nearly all weather events now have a contribution from climate change and it is up to us to manage and reduce that risk with mitigative action.
Think about places in the world that have 1/1000th the adaptive capacity as NYC.
And if you feel like punching yourself in the face tonight:
{ 0 comments }
Your humble blogger was innocently surfing the web yesterday when someone linked to Niall Ferguson’s latest Newsweek column. Now even though I’ve warned everyone — repeatedly — not to go to there, I made the mistake of clicking. And this is what I saw…
{ 0 comments }
Oh, god. So stupid.
{ 0 comments }
{ 0 comments }
Very Serious Journalists vs. Nate Silver has been the highlight of election 2012 for me.
It makes sense that pundits like Scarborough and Brooks would have it out for a numbers guy like Silver. Their oeuvre is the intangible. They analyze based on gut feelings and nonspecifics. Their great trick is to transform the utterly unquantifiable into something approaching concrete certainty…Nate Silver is being raked over the coals for committing the sin of showing his math.
People Who Can’t Do Math Are So Mad At Nate Silver.
Nate’s model continued to show an Obama edge even after Denver, and has shown that edge widening over the past couple of weeks.
This could be wrong, obviously. And we’ll find out on Election Day. But the methodology has been very clear, and all the election modelers have been faithful to their models, letting the numbers fall where they may.
Yet the right — and we’re not talking about the fringe here, we’re talking about mainstream commentators and publications — has been screaming “bias”! They know, just know, that Nate must be cooking the books. How do they know this? Well, his results look good for Obama, so it must be a cheat. Never mind the fact that Nate tells us all exactly how he does it, and that he hasn’t changed the formula at all.
This is, of course, reminiscent of the attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics — not to mention the attacks on climate science and much more. On the right, apparently, there is no such thing as an objective calculation. Everything must have a political motive.
This is really scary. It means that if these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign.
It’s natural that establishment pundits would dislike Silver, of course. He deals in numbers, whereas they are quantitative illiterates. He made his bones in the grimy world of sports statistics, they made theirs doing respectable things like blowing Marty Peretz (Lane) or writing comedic books about yuppies (Brooks). So they come from different places than he does.
This is about establishment media defending its turf, its position, its prestige. Fortunately, all of that is under siege. Once the American public was force-fed conventional wisdom by an establishment media that was profitable on its own terms; now people can read blogs and outsider pundits like Silver, and print media is hemorrhaging money.
{ 0 comments }