In a cab last night, I heard a radio station broadcast a medly of “Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States” calls, followed by a heavily caffeinated announcing repeatedly that it has been one year since Obama was elected and soliciting comments from his audience.
Yesterday was November 3. Obama was elected on November 4.
I don’t think that Election Day qualifies as a floating holiday in the same way that Thanksgiving or Columbus Day do. T-shirts from last year rarely displayed “Election Day 2008″ – instead, they grounded their message with a real date: November 4, 2008. Somehow the claim that the election was “one year ago” doesn’t sit right with me. I guess the real question is when do the Obamas toast the anniversary of their victory – did they do it last night or will they wait for tonight? I know it’s the latter, but my radio station would obviously fall behind the rest with stale reports on things nobody cares about anymore because another media outlet had an excuse to broadcast it earlier.
As much as I agree with Maureen Dowd’s latest opinion (shocking, yes), this drives me crazy:
If W. had gone to Dover in the middle of the night to salute the war dead, Limbaugh and Liz Cheney would have been gushing about his patriotism.
But since it’s Obama who at last showed up there to see the brutal cost of war, they simply have to dismiss the moving moment as a publicity stunt.
This sort of statement seems the lynchpin of modern political debate, and it’s a travesty. It’s a conditional conjecture disguised as fact, and highlighted by comparison to an opposite set of circumstances. Bush did not go to Dover, and even if he had we do not know what Limbaugh and Liz would have said. It is ludicrous to use this as evidence for an argument.
It would be different if Dowd compared Obama’s Dover trip to an actual trip that Bush made under similar circumstances, and illustrated the difference in Limbaugh’s response then and now; that would be a real comparison, and she does come closer to that ideal in a later paragraph. This excerpt, however, is purely speculative (or at least, unsupported in her opinion).
I hoped we were past the point where a colloquial call to induction like “you know if the situation were reversed he would have said so and so…” would not be considered appropriate evidence for a formal argument. (Even though I think she’s right.)
Andrew Gelman’s latest post highlights the importance of interactions. He includes this breakdown of where people fall depending on political party, ideology, and income:
Consider the income dimension. Among liberals, the income curve is flat no matter whether the person is a Democrat, Independent or Republican. For conservatives, however, income has a large effect – in fact it becomes a strong predictor of political party. Thus, in modeling the impact of income on party, we must consider the income-ideology interaction. Without it, we would overstate the impact among liberals and understate it among conservatives.
It is not enough to merely include ideology as a separate variable in a linear model, however. That would be tantamount to presenting two distinct graphs instead of the three-way graph above – one of party vs income and another of party vs ideology. The interaction of income and ideology is explicitly ignored.
Instead, one must consider what essentially amounts to three different income variables: one for conservatives; another for moderates; and a third for liberals. These three variables would each have different coefficients, and so the model could properly capture the joint impact of income and ideology.
Be warned, though: interactions can quickly lead to overfitting, as they increase the number of variables geometrically. An exploratory analysis like the graph above or a compelling alternative hypothesis is a necessary prerequisite to using interactions in a model; if an interaction isn’t justified, you probably shouldn’t use it.
House Minority Leader Boehner recently released this “infographic” (I use the term loosely) in order to demonstrate his frustration with the House Democrats’s heath proposal:
The chart really is an absolute nightmare: the colors, layout, and hidden connections contribute to an absolutely impossible-to-read image, which is exactly what Rep Boehner wants.
Recently, Robert Palmer, a graphic designer in California, took it upon himself to untangle this mess. Here is his version of the chart (click to zoom):
Now, neither chart makes a strong case for or against the policy itself; both attempt merely to show all the affected parties. But the fact that Robert Palmer was able to lay out an extraordinarily clear picture of all participants demonstrates that Rep. Boehner’s chart was intentionally obfuscated in order to mislead and confuse. The only other explanations are that whoever put it together a) didn’t understand the layout or b) didn’t understand how to present it. Ignorance, in this case, is not bliss.
When we are handed data or statistics, we have an enormous power to construct convincing arguments and clear presentations of otherwise complicated ideas. To abuse those tools (and the public’s faith in those tools) by using them to construct a bad analysis is a poor policy choice – not only is it easily falsifiable, but it erodes the ability to effectively communicate at all.
Lies, damn lies and statistics… the two charts above claim to show the exact same situation. Undoubtedly, there are many more graphics that could be constructed – are any of them actually “right”? Hard to say, but I feel that the first chart is “wrong” without question because it breaks every rule of effective design. The tax may well be a beaurocratic nightmare, as Rep. Boehner claims. And Palmer’s chart does not show a lack of bureaucracy, it merely lays out the connections clearly. But by constructing a graphic which willfully corrupts its own message, Rep. Boehner undermines his argument: if his chart shows a tangled mess but Palmer can untangle it, then the public will conclude that Boehner was wrong. He would have done better to have shown Palmer’s chart in the first place and claim that there are too many connections on it – that way any refute would live only in the realm of opinion, not demonstrable fact.
David Brooks has an op-ed tracking the hypothetical lifecycle of Obama’s healthcare plan which I found entertaining because I was sure he was being sarcastic. How could I not, with choice bits like this:
You are daunted by the challenges in front of you until you remember that by some great act of fortune, you happen to be Barack Obama. This calms you down. You conceive a strategy.
But it doesn’t go quite as planned:
But you won’t be able to honestly address the toughest issues and still hold your coalition. You won’t get the kind of structural change that will bring down costs long-term. In the scrum, Congress will embrace the easy stuff and bury the hard stuff.
Which is why you have MedPAC. That’s the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission that you want to turn into a health care Federal Reserve Board — an aloof technocratic body of experts that will make tough decisions beyond the reach of politics. You can take every thorny issue, throw it to MedPac and consider it solved.
In the end it turns out Brooks isn’t being sarcastic at all; he views this outcome as a success. After all, the Fed has done such a great job, it would be foolish not to establish another one!
Reverend Wright has resurfaced, and here’s what he has to say about Obama:
“Them Jews aren’t going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter, that he’ll talk to me in five years when he’s a lame duck, or in eight years when he’s out of office.”
I’m speechless…
When I first saw this picture, I thought Obama’s media team must have fallen asleep at their otherwise pristine desks, or resigned:
The image shows the President speaking on the phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And yes, those are the President’s shoes in the picture.
I’m astounded. Showing the soles of one’s shoes is among the worst insults of the Arab world. There is no excuse for not knowing that. Six months ago, an Irqui reporter threw his shoes at then-President Bush and the event (as well as its cultural ramifications) was seared into the American conscience. Yet here, the White House has chosen to release a photo of the President speaking to the Israeli PM (not exactly loved in the Arab world) while displaying his shoe soles??
But that’s not all — Israelis are feeling angry and insulted as well! The stated reason is that after all their time in the Middle East, Israelis have adopted the shoe sole taboo as their own, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the resposnse is much more pragmatic: the Israelis are afraid that this image will lead to some sort of retaliation, as if they were the people foolish enough to release it.
Maybe for an encore they’ll fly near some Manhattan skyscrapers in Air Force One.
A new Rasmussen survey finds that voters trust Republicans more than Democrats in 6 out of 10 examined issues, with Republicans being favored on the issue most on voters’ minds – the economy – 45% to 39%. It’s the first time in two years that Republicans have been favored on the economy.
This comes despite another Rasmussen survey from last week showing that 62% of voters blame Bush and not Obama for the economy’s ails.
And all of this in light of a recent Gallup survey which shows that a whopping 25% of people think the GOP is “unfavorable.”
What do we learn? Absolutely nothing, especially from polls with sampling errors of 3% either way.
I think I’ve seen something like this on late night TV: Congress has a new bill which overhauls credit card regulations… and they’re throwing in relaxed gun control, absolutely free (but only if Obama signs right now)!
Indeed, the latest fiasco out of Washington is a rushed so-called consumer protection plan, which has a second provision allowing loaded firearms to be carried in our national parks. If that’s not pork, I don’t know what is. In fact, it reinstates a last-minute Bush law that was overturned in March.
On the credit card side of things, it seems fairly reasonable to me – a lot of common sense measures aimed at making penalty information more clear and less surprising. There’s some chatter that by making it less profitable to lend, the bill will incentivize credit card companies to hold back credit, exacerbating the liquidity crisis, but that seems overblown to me. Very little in the bill will actually inhibit the ability for credit card companies to profit. The point that comes closest to achieving that would not allow rates to be raised on existing balances, but let’s be realistic: if you have an existing balance, your next statement isn’t exactly going to get paid right away. Not to worry, the “predatory lenders” will still have their chances. A second measure increasing the notification period before raising rates from 15 days to 45 days makes sense, as it guarantees all consumers one chance to pay off their debt before new rates hit. Under the old system, only half of cardholders would have a billing cycle close before rates could be increased. The impact to the bottom line is probably minimal; the effect on consumer’s ability to maneuver their finances is large.
But it’s all a bit redundant, seeing as just a few months ago Bernanke put forth “the most comprehensive and sweeping reforms ever adopted by the [Fed] for credit card accounts.” Yes, it’s nice that now it will be a “law” (a purely semantic difference in this case), and the timetable has been moved up a few months from the Fed’s July 2010 rollout, but I don’t think Congress should quite be patting themselves on the back for solving anything with new thinking. Oh – I forgot, any chance to stick it to some financial firms is one worth taking.
Turning now to the loaded gun side of things… is this for real? Talk about a hijacked bill! Naturally, our self-serving and desperate-to-get-reelected legislators in the House made sure to hold two separate votes, one for credit cards and one for guns, so that in the future no one would be able to accuse them of voting for the gun bill when they were “really” voting for the credit cards. However, since Democratic party leaders already agreed to swallow the gun law as a cost of getting the credit card measure passed, this was largely a political waste of time.
The stated purpose of the bill is “to protect innocent Americans from violent crime in national parks and refuges.” Let’s go to the tape, shall we? The Washington Post provides a break down of crime in National Parks through 2006 (if anyone has more recent data, send it along!):
Crime rates are expressed as incidents/100 thousand people, so this chart implies a total crime rate of 1.65 for our national parks. The violent crime rate (just the first 5 lines) was a tiny 0.14. In 2006, New York City’s violent crime rate was 637 (yes, a difference of 3 orders of magnitude). The violent crime rate for the United States as a whole was 469 in 2005, which means that violent crime is three thousand and twenty-nine times more likely outside the national parks than in them. We need to allow loaded guns to protect citizens in the parks? Hardly.
Yes, the 11 homicides in 2006 were 11 too many. But the parks are hardly a bastion of violent crime – in fact they are among the safest locations in our country! The parks’ violent crime rates are so minuscule that the likelihood of a victim also carrying a gun (presumably, with which to protect themselves) is tiny unless everyone starts carrying a weapon on their park visits.
Chalk this rider up to an “I’ll show you!” attitude which is increasingly pervading our politics and dividing our legislators on party lines. I only wish more of our elected officials had the guts to kill it, and I remain fervently hopefully that Obama’s promise of “no more pork” will one day take hold.
Obama the comedian at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner: