Category Archives: Election

Did Anyone Learn Anything?

Did Anyone Learn Anything? asks Brian Beutler. rhetorically.

All the pundits (and there are a LOT of them) who think the GOP is going to do anything different or act differently since Obama won last night are fooling themselves. All anyone needs to do to confirm this is to take a look at the actual GOP who actually ran and won (and there a LOT of them, too) this time around. They ran on opposing Obama, Obamacare, anti-Christ Obama, European socialist Obama, abortion-loving Obama, tax and spend Obama, anti-religion Obama, scary black man Obama, and all the other imaginary Obama-shaped demons of their nightmare fantasies (collect the whole set!). Those people, all the GOP House members who won, all the GOP Senators who won, both incumbent and incoming: those people are going to be in office. They still think he's trying to destroy America. So who seriously expects any of them to say "Oh, Obama won? The America-hating, socialist, abortionist Kenyan who I spent six months demonizing? Well that changes everything! I take it all back. Let's play nice. Who wants to raise taxes!" ? Well, OK. Apparently some people think that. But it's dead wrong.

Did anyone learn anything? Well of course not. There was nothing to learn. The next two years, at least, will be the same as the last two years, because it's pretty much the same bunch of people, with pretty much the same amount of power, dealing with pretty much the same issues.

Atlas Pouted

James Fallows has hooked himself a real stinker! Earlier in the week, he got and posted a reader email from some guy who threatened to close his business if Obama won.

Then Fallows posted a barrage of reader emails laughing at the guy, leading "Atlas" to respond with an awesomely pathetic, rambling, wingnutty response, in which he doubled-down on his threat to close his own business, and send all his employees packing (despite claiming that he "treats his employees well"!).

As of last night, it looks like he might actually do it! What a brat.

Petulant, entitled, spiteful: the modern GOP.

PR could be a State?

I'd love to see Puerto Rico become the 51st state.

  1. We would have to stop referring to Canada / Israel / UK / Mexico / DC as the "51st State" - a cliche I dislike.
  2. It would bring two probably-Democratic Senators and 5 probably-Democratic House members.
  3. The current House Republicans would be forced to choose between voting in favor of PR's statehood or demolishing any chance of getting any Hispanic support, for a generation.
  4. I really dislike the idea of "territories". In or out, IMO.
  5. A 51-star flag would be fun.

As I Was Saying

about those road signs...

Nate Silver:

North Carolina remains close, with Mitt Romney leading by about two percentage points statewide, or 60,000 votes, with half of the vote counted.

Almost all of Mr. Romney’s advantage can be explained by one county, Wake County, in North Carolina’s Research Triangle. President Obama won it by 64,000 votes in 2008. This year, Mr. Romney leads by 2,000 votes so far.

Wake County: that's me. For the next seven days, anyway.

Signs, Signs, Everywhere There's Signs

I counted yard signs on my way home today. Of the 18 yards with campaign signs for President, 16 were for Romney/Ryan.

This doesn't count the rogue signs planted on public or ownership-not-obvious land - of which there are plenty, and which were all for Romney.

Polls say NC is still close (though leaning Romney). But in my part of the state, Romney would win the lawn sign race by a CRUSHING landslide.

"The case for not voting" is a waste of time

What's so silly about this is that in the time it takes a person to read this, that person could've instead read a quick overview of the GOP and Democratic party platforms, and thereby educated themselves enough to know which party would best fit their policy preferences. This isn't hard. It doesn't take hours of study.

Statistics is a bourgeois pseudoscience

Paul Krugman, talking about how the right has turned against NYT statistical blogger, Nate Silver:

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.

Or, in a word and a half: proto-"Lysenkoism".

Lysenkoism is used metaphorically to describe the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives.

...

From 1934 to 1940, under Lysenko's admonitions and with Stalin's approval, many geneticists were executed (including Isaak Agol, Solomon Levit, Grigorii Levitskii, Georgii Karpechenko and Georgii Nadson) or sent to labor camps. The famous Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943.[9]

Genetics was stigmatized as a 'bourgeois science' or 'fascist science' (because fascists — particularly the Nazis in Germany — embraced genetics and attempted to use it to justify their theories on eugenics and the master race, which culminated in Action T4).

...

In 1948, genetics was officially declared "a bourgeois pseudoscience";[10] all geneticists were fired from their jobs (some were also arrested), and all genetic research was discontinued. Nikita Khrushchev, who claimed to be an expert in agricultural science, also valued Lysenko as a great scientist, and the taboo on genetics continued (but all geneticists were released or rehabilitated posthumously). The ban was only waived in the mid-1960s.