Reality-BasedTM Political Numbers from Nicholas Beaudrot
Electoral Math
Reality-BasedTM Political Numbers from Nicholas Beaudrot
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| Nov 30 | Non-withdrawl |
| Nov 28 | More Tipping Point |
| Nov 24 | Gobble Gobble |
| Nov 23 | Mr. Summers, Please Pick Up the White Courtesy Phone |
| Nov 22 | Pop Quiz |
| Nov 20 | Least Favorite Movies |
| Nov 18 | Wheel Removal |
| Nov 17 | This week in Cynicism |
| Nov 15 | Why Does George W. Bush Hate Cattle Ranchers? |
| Nov 12 | I Made This |
| Nov 12 | My Life is Now Complete |
| Nov 10 | Election Stragglers |
| Nov 8 | Election 2005: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly |
| Nov 8 | Vote Today! |
| Nov 3 | What to make of the Kaine-Kilgore race |
| Nov 3 | Alito Night Music |
| Oct 31 | Drinking Liberally: "Port Battle" |
The White House has now embarked on a public information campaign to convince the American people that it knows what it's doing in Iraq, complete with a 35-page National Strategy for Victory in Iraq. [Didn't the President land on an aircraft carrier and claim major combat operations were over ... oh, I don't know .... eighteen months ago? Okay, then.]
It's too early to see how this will play, but it looks like a warmed over set of right-reactionary talking points about how Iraq is now the "central front in the war on terror" and that "failure is not an option". There is some further detail as to what's going on in Iraq, but noticeably, there are no benchmarks for progress on economic reconstruction, troop training, or ... well ... anything. One is thus forced to wonder how the White House plans on measuring its success.
Despite some liberal quivering that this was going to be Bush's pivot-on-a-dime speech, Atrios had this one right. I was worried for a minute too, until I realized that no one in any position of authority in the White House was confirming any specifics of a troop withdrawl.
Update: What do C.S. Lewis, Louisa May Alcott, Joel Coen, Garry Shandling, Rahm Emanuel (!!), Janet Napolitano, Don Cheadle, and Mariano Rivera all have in common? They have the same birthday as me!
Over at MyDD, Jonathan Singer points out that Jim Kolbe's district is imminently winnable, and that at this point in the election cycle in 1994, only nine House Democrats had announced their retirements (at present, five House Republicans have announced theirs), plus nine other members leaving their seats in order to run for higher office. So there is still a good chance that during the next quarter, we will see another half dozen or so retirements, perhaps from moderate districts, further increasing the chances of a Democratic landslide.
Also worth noting, Democratic representation in DC is very, very, calcified, with very little turnover in the House of Representatives. Republican turnover is low by historical standards, but not quite as low as Democratic turnover. Interestingly, we also live in a time where Supreme Court turnover is low by historical standards, so perhaps there's just something in the air.
I should point out that since I work in retail, "free time" is not something that exists in my world between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so posting will probably be lighter than usual.
Meanwhile, Jim Kolbe's retirement may signal a sea-change. I have some notes on it over at Ezra's.
Via Urs, The American Prospect pens a lengthy column on changes in work/family arrangements over the last half century, pointing out that even among the well-to-do, more and more women seem to be "choosing" to stay at home rather than . It seems a little strange
Lost in the hubbub of Larry Summers's statement that he thought there would be unremediable differences in mathematical and scientific aptitude between men and women, Summers claimed that the more important problem was the set of social choices we have made that consciously or unconsciously push more far women than men out of the high-power workforce. Universal child care isn't enough to solve the problem -- it's going to take real culture changes to get fathers to stay home and to get businesses to stop stigmatizing materinity/paternity leave.
SurveyUSA's latest fifty state job approval poll is out. I'd like you to guess which blue state gives the President the highest job approval rating.
New Hampshire was might close; Kerry won by a scant 9,000 votes. Sure, it's a small state, but that was still only good enough for a 1.4% margin of victory. Even if the President's decline in approval ratings isn't uniformly distributed around the country, the Granite State would still have a leg up on the rest of the country, right? No.
Wisconsin was a razor thin win for Kerry, and other than New Hampshire, the only state Kerry won where polls regularly showed him losing. So if it's not New Hampshire, surely it must be there, right? No again.
Pennsylvania has a large and populous central region that's fairly conservative, and the 2004 results there were pretty close. So that might be it, right? No again! So what state could it possibly be?
Washington. There are now ten red states that give Bush a lower job approval rating than the Evergreen State. I'd be tempted to say that this was just a little float in the polling data, but his second highest approval rating can be found in Oregon. What's even more bizarre is that while the President's approval rating has gone down in the rest of the country, it's gone up in the Pacific Northwest for the past two months.
I have no good explanation for this. I don't even have a bad explanation for this.
Taking a break from politics, 10 movies that made me gag (via Amy H via Atrios):
Yours?
Some notes on the open budget failure yesterday:
Pre-publishing update: Looks like we spoke too soon. "Narrow win for bill that cuts $50B for poor, students and farmers". (Roll Call). It looks like House leadership simple scaled back the cuts to food stamps, free school lunches, welfare benefits and other programs, but those programs will still be cut. As Warren Buffet says, if there's a class war going on, his class is winning.
An interesting note: all of the "nay" votes from the right came back into the fold.
Dear press corps: It is not a deficit control bill. The Republican budget cuts spending by $50B, but also reduces revenue by $70B. By the Fundamental Theorem of Elementary School Arithmetic, the new budget will increase the deficit. Good work, folks.
Recend editions of The Hill include articles with headlines like this:
Awesome.
Update: How could I forget: "Specter's pork chop riles sens". Pork happens, and making too much of an issue out of pork distracts from the basic failures of Republican governance, but it's gotten out of hand under the current congress, which has six times as many earmarks in its highway bill as the bill in 1998. "The savings will be used to pay for the fight against the global spread of AIDS; to increase funding for LIHEAP, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program; and to fund new construction of health-preparedness facilities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said a House GOP aide familiar with the legislation." Clearly, that bridge to nowhere is more important than keeping poor people from freezing this winter or AIDS prevention.
Big Media Matt's got his Canadian softwood lumber imports, I've got my premium beef exports.
Tucked in this CBS news summary is another reference to my favorite long-running beef (literally) with the Bush administration:
[National Security Advisor Steven Hadley] dashed any prospect that Japan would lift its ban on American beef imports during Bush's visit ...
Creekstone Farms, which relied on exports to Japan for 80% of its business, has been unable to export any of its premium beef to Japan since the Mad Cow incident in December 2003. Japan requires that any country that has reported a case of the disease test each head of cattle. Despite Creekstone's willingness to pay 100% of the testing costs and the construction of a new testing facility, the USDA still wouldn't allow Creekstone to perform the necessary tests. The department's fig leaf concern was that such tests would raise the suspicion that untested beef would possess Mad Cow, which is, of course, poppycock.
So, why does George W. Bush hate premium beef?
You may have already seen my post on Ezra's, but I am so intrigued by my handywork that I thought I'd show it here.
Here's a map of Mark Warner's performance in 2001:
And here's one of Tim Kaine's in 2005
Leaving us with this map of the change in Democratic performance:
Kaine's major success was his improvement in suburban and exurban DC, as well as the Norfolk/Newport News/Virginia Beach area. If he can recapture just half of Mark Warner's strength in Southwest Virginia, Democrats will run the state for a long, long, time.
Dover, Pennsylvania, one of the latest sites where the intelligent design movement has tried to gain a foothold, voted out all eight incumbent school board members. I guess the people of Dover didn't want to be made fun of on The Daily Show anymore.
RIP, The Monorail, 1997-2005. Worth a laugh.
The Good:
The Sad (in the "sniff" sense, not the "pathetic" sense):
The Ugly:
And on that note, it's time to go to bed. On balance, it was a good night -- it could have been better, but all things considered most of the important races went very well.
To finish up my "endorsements" from two weeks ago, Reject King County Proposition 1; for the Port Commission seat vote Rich Berkowitz; vote Yes on SMPA proposition 1; and for SPMA position 8 vote ... fore ... Cindi Laws.
My hunch is that the monorail will fold after SPMA proposition 1 doesn't pass. But we shall see.
Tonight, Drinking Liberally will host an election night watch at the Montlake Ale House. Bring a laptop with wireless if you can.
Tim Kaine now leads Jerry Kilgore in every poll that's been taken in the past two weeks. Before we start building shrines to Mark Warner, let's take a moment to consider the sequence of events that got us to this situation:
We know that negative ads usually work. So, why did they not work in this case? I'll explore that in my next post.
I've got several days worth of news to catch up with, but let's just start here: Sam Alito appears to be one of the most reactionary Supreme Court nominees the President could have found. Unsurprisingly, the conservative businesses machine is pretty happy.
I suppose it's a positive sign that Alito thinks you have a right to birth control, at least according to Arlen Specter (R-PA). And he seems to believe in some sort of privacy right, though, that may have changed in the last 30 years of his life. However, his various opinions and dissents suggest that he's not particularly sympathetic to the legal claims of plaintiffs and workers, and doesn't seem to think the police force need strict judicial oversight. There are four real winners among his opinions.
The case that will grab the most headlines is his dissent in in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v Casey. Here, Alito suggests that husband notification laws do not pose an "undue burden" on women seeking an abortion, since the vast majority of women won't be substantially bothered by such laws. But, of course, for those women who are bothered by them -- for example, those who fear retribution from an abusive husband -- they would in practice make it impossible for them to obtain an abortion. Alito's opinion is either oblivious or insensitive to the impact the law will have on these women.
The opinion with the largest practical impact is Chittister v Pennsylvania Department of Community Development, in which Alito argues that state employees do not have a right to sue their employers for violations of the Family and Medical Leave Act. As a matter of law, these decisions line up properly with a series of "doctrine of sovereign immunity" cases in which the Rehnquist court made it more and more difficult for private citizens to bring lawsuits against the government of the state where they lived. Curiously, in Nevada Department of Human Resources v Hibbs, the Supreme Court eventually chose not to apply this doctrine to the FMLA.
The best example of conservative judicial activism, and the most sensational case, is Alito's dissent in Doe v Groody (PDF). Here, the majority on the Circuit Court ruled that search warrant should be construed narrowly rather than broadly, and that the strip-searching of a ten year old child who was not specifically named in the warrant is not a violation of her constitutional rights. This is another case that comes down to how much you trust the police. My laypersons view that a plain reading of the warrant does not allow the searching of additional individuals. But these documents are often written in the haste of a criminal investigation, so I am mildly sympathetic to the idea that police should be given a little bit of leeway in procedural matters. Nonetheless, Alito's decision does show a bias towards giving the police considerable latitude, which makes it harder to ensure disciplined investigations.
Finally, most personally jarring to me is Robinson v City of Pittsburgh, a case in which Carmen Robinson attempted to sue her harrasser, her supervisor, and her employer for creating a hostile work environment, and for knowingly allowing harrassment to occur. During the trial phase, Robinson lost some of her claims to the judge, and some of them to the jury. The Circuit court reversed a few of the judge-made rulings, sending part of the case back to trial for further examination. The opinion -- which is very dry -- suggests that various police officers who didn't engage in harrassment, but did nothing to stop it, cannot be held liable because they did not have direct supervision over the harrasser. While I am thoroughly unsympathetic to bosses who negligently allow workplace harrassment to occur, it appears that reason Robinson couldn't win her case was because of a lack of evidence. This may be one of those unfortunate cases where the facts one can prove in court are simply not enough to prove what actually happened. I may be forced to agree with Alito's opinion because what we "know" from the trial record doesn't show any responsibility on the part of the police chief, but what we know shows that there is.
Further reading:
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updated by Nicholas Beaudrot on 11:00 24 November 2005
