Friday, October 31, 2008
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Monday, October 27, 2008
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Friday, October 24, 2008
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
Friday, October 17, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
California Bullet train?
Prop 1A - a 10$ billion bond authorization for a bullet train. A tough cell in a broke state? Or an easy sell with high gas prices?
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Oct 14th Polls
Cuz I like good news.
Perhaps the CBS poll that shows Barack Obama with a 14-point lead among likely voters (12 points when third-party candidates are included) is a modest outlier. But if so, John McCain has more and more outliers that he has to explain away these days. There are now no fewer than seven current national polls that show Obama with a double-digit advantage: Newsweek (+11), ABC/Post (+10), Democracy Corps (+10), Research 2000 (+10), Battleground (+13), Gallup (+10 using their Likely Voter II model) and now this CBS News poll.
These are balanced by other results that show the race a hair tighter. Our model now projects that, were an election held today, Obama would win by 8.1 points. It also expects that the race is more likely than not to tighten some.
Nevertheless, we are a full month beyond the Lehman Brothers collapse in mid-September. Obama has enjoyed quite a remarkable run, turning a 2-point deficit into an 8-point advantage. What's especially remarkable about it is that Obama's lead has continued to increase with an eerily consistency. The collapse itself precipitated an almost immediate 3 or 4 point gain in Obama's poll numbers, moving him from a point or so down to a point or so ahead. But since then, Obama has won news cycle after news cycle, adding another two points or so to his national lead every week.
It's fairly unusual for a candidate to have such a sustained run of momentum so deep into the campaign cycle. And it does appear to be real momentum, with some real feedback loops: the worse McCain's poll numbers become, the more desperate his campaign looks, and the more desperate his campaign looks, the worse his poll numbers become.
McCain now has to go on a run of his own, a large enough run to wipe at least 8 points off of Obama's lead, and perhaps more like 9 or 10 to cover his inferior position in the Electoral College and the votes that Obama is banking in early and absentee balloting. It is imperative that McCain does not just draw tomorrow night's debate, does not just win a victory on points, but emerges with a resounding victory, the sort that leaves the spin room gasping for air. Failing that, we are getting into dead girl, live boy territory.
The politics of Politics 2.0
or, Open Source Politics in the US and Canada (btw - the Canadian election is today)
In the U.S., those true believers have created the extraordinary online juggernaut that appears poised to propel Barack Obama to the White House next month.I guess the next election will incorporate aspects of the geospatial web for even more targeted campaigning.
Obama uses the web for all the usual campaign functions; raising money, pushing his message, keeping supporters and the press abreast of what he is doing and saying.
But the revolutionary aspect of Obama's online operation has not been so much its ability to use the web to talk to supporters as its ability to allow them to talk to each other, to form real and virtual communities that inspire others, especially young people, who have never before been politically engaged.
On his website, Obama writes "I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington. I'm asking you to believe in yours."
He is not just running a campaign, he is using the web to try to create a political movement.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Ads
McCain is running this nationally. Waddya think? This doesn't seem to strong to me. the blind ambition bit might work, but it is so vague that it isn't really credible. And the second bit seems especially odd - especially since it goes against the standard "wisdom", i.e. "Liberals want more regulation"...
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Monday, October 06, 2008
Keating Economics
Linking the Keating 5 affair and the economic meltdown... They have a 13 minute documentary. Looks like Obama has his own Oct. surprise.
Sunday, October 05, 2008
Gettin' Ugly
So, it looks like the McCain campaign, obviously eager to change the dynamic is going to *shocker* get even more ugly. Palin has already started by saying the Obama pals around with terrorists.
On a related note, Rolling Stone has come out with a set of articles deconstructing McCain. My favourite is a piece on Palin: "Mad Dog Palin"
On a related note, Rolling Stone has come out with a set of articles deconstructing McCain. My favourite is a piece on Palin: "Mad Dog Palin"
Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power. Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she's the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV — and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.[update]This is Obama's jujitsu move:
Saturday, October 04, 2008
Friday, October 03, 2008
Thursday, October 02, 2008
The Politics of Fear
Science that explains a lot
he authors first conducted a random telephone survey of Lincoln residents to find some who held strong political opinions. Then 46 selected respondents were invited to come in to the lab and fill in questionnaires to reveal political beliefs and personality traits. Participants were then given two types of tests to measure physiological responses to threat.If this is right, then meditation, which reduces one's physiological reaction to such stimulus, might actually make people more liberal.
First, they were attached to equipment to measure skin conductivity, which rises with emotional stress as the moisture level in skin goes up. Each participant was shown threatening images, such as a bloody face interspersed with innocuous pictures of things such as bunnies, and rise in skin conductance in response to the shocking image was measured. The other measure was the involuntary eye blink that people have in response to something startling, such as a sudden loud noise. The scientists measured the amplitude of blinks via electrodes that detected muscle contractions under people's eyes.
The researchers found that both of these responses correlated significantly with whether a person was liberal or conservative socially. Subjects who had expressed a high level of support for policies "protecting the social unit" showed a much larger change in skin conductance in response to alarming photos than those who didn't support such policies. Similarly, the mean blink amplitude for the socially protective subjects was significantly higher, the team reports in tomorrow's issue of Science. Co-author Kevin Smith says the results showed that automatic fear responses are better predictors of protective attitudes than sex or age (men and older people tend to be more conservative).
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