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.)
From the LA Times, a remarkable transformation is taking place:
And as hard-liners repeated their signature cries of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” Mousavi supporters overwhelmed them with chants of “Death to Russia” and “Death to China,” referring to the two U.N. Security Council members that have shielded Iran from much tougher sanctions over its nuclear program.
See also: this and this. (Don’t you hate when people do that? The links are a video of the “death to Russia” chant and a blogged eyewitness account, respectively.)
Who knew the little guy was so prolific? A very funny read in today’s NYT:
As we head into the second hundred days of my administration, I feel more pride and pleasure than ever at the prospect of serving the American people and finding ways to make this nation, and this planet, a better place for our children and our children’s children. I am speaking metaphorically here, of course, as I am neutered.
At the recent Radio and TV Correspondents’ Dinner, John Hodgman (you know him – he’s a PC) followed Obama’s humorous address with one of his own, delivering one of the funniest speeches I’ve had the pleasure of watching this year.
Hodgman immediately identifies Obama as “the first nerd president of the modern era” and proceeds to investigate the claim with enthusiasm.
It is simply brilliant comedy, and even Obama can not maintain his “Spock-ish calm.”
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!
I find this graph very interesting, not just because of any implied political statements, but for how it highlights the absurdity of economic forecasting and the potentially misguided trust we place in such numbers.
The blue lines were circulated by Obama’s economic team when they were pitching the stimulus bill in order to illustrate its beneficial impact on national unemployment. The red line is the realized unemployment rate to date.
There are two ways to read it, depending on your objective:
- Obama’s economic team was overly optimistic, underestimated the severity of the crisis, and the stimulus plan has failed to help as advertised.
- Obama’s economic team was overly optimistic, underestimated the severity of the crisis, but things would have been much worse without the stimulus.
Ultimately, the question is whether the level or the shape of the graph is more important. Personally, I find it surprising that (as with the bank stress tests), a situation which was markedly better than a worst case scenario was used to demonstrate the effects of the stimulus. Nonetheless, the fact that this graph was used for demonstration purposes makes it difficult to fault simply because it was plotted 1% too low.
Perhaps it never should have been circulated in the first place. This raises a very touchy point in forecasting: an expectation is almost never perfectly realized. Unless an audience comprehends that fact, then putting a forecast out there can only lead to critique. In a simple example, if I calculate a distribution of outcomes and know it to be the correct distribution with high certainty, then my forecast will be the mean or expected value. But what are the chances that the mean is actually the realized outcome? To be sure, higher than any other single observation, but relatively small nonetheless. This speaks to the importance of confidence intervals and margins of error; my guess, however, is that the margins of error on this graph (however that might be measured) would have included the “improvement” line, making the difference not statistically significant.
More pointedly, however, the stimulus was supposed to “save or create” 4mm jobs. This means that the area between the two curves equals 4mm, but the implied difference here seems much larger to me.
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.
