Month: September 2012

Just a reminder about Rasmussen Polls. They suck. Here’s a snippet from Nate Silver’s post-2010 midterms analysis:

The 105 polls released in Senate and gubernatorial races by Rasmussen Reports and its subsidiary, Pulse Opinion Research, missed the final margin between the candidates by 5.8 points, a considerably higher figure than that achieved by most other pollsters. Some 13 of its polls missed by 10 or more points, including one in the Hawaii Senate race that missed the final margin between the candidates by 40 points, the largest error ever recorded in a general election in FiveThirtyEight’s database, which includes all polls conducted since 1998.

Moreover, Rasmussen’s polls were quite biased, overestimating the standing of the Republican candidate by almost 4 points on average. In just 12 cases, Rasmussen’s polls overestimated the margin for the Democrat by 3 or more points. But it did so for the Republican candidate in 55 cases — that is, in more than half of the polls that it issued.

If one focused solely on the final poll issued by Rasmussen Reports or Pulse Opinion Research in each state — rather than including all polls within the three-week interval — it would not have made much difference. Their average error would be 5.7 points rather than 5.8, and their average bias 3.8 points rather than 3.9.

Nor did it make much difference whether the polls were branded as Rasmussen Reports surveys, or instead, were commissioned for Fox News by its subsidiary Pulse Opinion Research. (Both sets of surveys used an essentially identical methodology.) Polls branded as Rasmussen Reports missed by an average of 5.9 points and had a 3.9 point bias. The polls it commissioned on behalf of Fox News had a 5.1 point error, and a 3.6 point bias.

I mention this because not a few right-wingers are hanging their hats on the fact that Rasmussen shows better results for Mitt Romney and other Republican office-seekers than the consensus of other polls. That appears to be the point of Rasmussen Polls, especially since most outfits are now using aggregates of all the polls that are released. Nate and I actually had a liquor-soaked conversation about Rasmussen’s shitty-polling during a party at the Netroots Nation conference in Pittsburgh (in 2009). Yet, he recently admitted that his current model allows Rasmussen to have quite a bit of influence.

…the Gallup and Rasmussen Reports polls can have a lot of influence on the forecast at times when there is a potential turning point in the race. The trendline adjustment that the model calculates compares changes in the results produced by the same polling firms over time. Since the Gallup and Rasmussen Reports national tracking polls have been published almost every day since the spring, they represent highly important data series in this process.

Nate does have a way to correct for consistent bias over time, but merely by being a Republican-supporting data point that plays an important role in his model, and in the other aggregators which mostly do not correct for such bias, Rasmussen’s overall effect is to skew the picture of the political landscape in a rightward direction.

In other words, if you’re reading analysis that takes Rasmussen seriously at all, you’re a dummy. Nate hopes that a consistently flawed polling methodology can nonetheless provide trend lines as long as the methodology remains consistent. In other words, even if Rasmussen is consistently showing results that are four points too optimistic for the Republican, if you account for that you can see when the contests are growing closer or farther apart.

I’d prefer it if their results were simply ignored and their outfit ostracized as bad-faith operators. It’s not that I don’t believe that Nate can utilize their data usefully, but he’s the only one who is making the correction for bias. I do not believe you have any such correction at Real Clear Politics or Talking Points Memo, although I will update and correct this post if I am wrong.

It seems to me that Rasmussen’s polls are designed to skew the perception of the state of play in the Republicans’ direction, which can help fundraising, press coverage, and morale among activists. It’s dishonest and dishonorable, and it is also effective.

People, including, Nate, should know better than to treat them as an honest data point.

Mitt Romney has raised less money from small donors than John McCain did in 2008. And, overall, he has roughly $40 million less under his direct control than the president. His big donors have already maxed out, but Obama can keep going back to a massive pool of small donors. The RNC has a big money advantage over the DNC, but they don’t know what to do with it. Their ground game is pathetic. And how is Romney supposed to motivate people to work for him when he spends almost every day shooting himself in the foot and then putting his bloody foot in his mouth?

Nothing against the owners, patrons, or the dining establishment, but there is something poignant about Paul Ryan getting booed in Miami by a conference hall full of AARP members, and him waking up the next morning to make an appearance at Versailles Restaurant in the same city. If Rep. Ryan is trying out for the role of Marie Antoinette, he just might land the role. Seniors can’t afford private medical insurance? Let them eat cake!

I’m still struggling to understand why Mitt Romney’s family attorney (aka, his “blind” trustee) decided to tell everyone that Romney didn’t claim all the charitable deductions that he was entitled to declare. Were we all supposed to be like “Yeah!! There’s a man who keeps a promise to pay at least 13% of his income in taxes”? Or were we supposed to be like, “Yeah!! Look at how generous this guy is”?

Was this a matter of Romney not wanting to give a charitable contribution without us all knowing about it?

To be clear, I understand the motivation for wanting the keep the effective rate at 14.1% rather than 9%. But it is much less effective when you tell us all that you overpaying your taxes in order to avoid looking bad.

I mean, first of all, you look like a dolt to yourself and your peers. Romney, remember, famously said that he wouldn’t even be qualified to serve as president if he paid one cent more in taxes than he was legally obligated to do. So, he says that, and then goes out and pays a lot more in taxes than he was legally obligated to do. And his lawyer makes sure that we all know this when there was really no reason for us to know it. There’s no crime in failing to claim a charitable donation on your taxes.

While we try to figure these things out, maybe we should also attempt to predict who Romney will choose to insult next. One thing is almost certain. We won’t have to wait long to find out.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the three turreted Victorian house in Cape May, New Jersey.  I will be using my usual acrylic paints on a conventional 8×8 inch canvas.  The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

There are lots of changes for this week’s cycle.  Starting at the top, I’ve gone over the earlier “sky” with a fairly thin layer of blue and white paint, mixing as I went along.  The sky now has the consistent but slightly mottled appearance that I wanted.  Moving downward, the roof elements have been completed.  They are painted in shades of blue with the highlighted portions facing toward the right.  Below that, the siding now also shows the same arrangement, shadow to the left and highlights to the right.  Note that the earlier layers of paint show through the white of the siding, the orange most prominent amongst them.  The windows have been completed as well.  They have a variety of shadows as seen in the photo.  No two are exactly the same.  Below that, the porch has been revised with shadowed area at the base.  There is still a bit of work to do here but not much.  Around the house, the various bushes and trees have received some dark paint.  This will serve as the shadows for the green that is yet to come.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress for you next week.  See you then.

 

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

 

Tommy Thompson, Republican US Senate candidate in Wisconsin — unlike Paul Ryan who still tries to hide the stinky cheese that his vaunted plan to save Medicare would essentially kill Medicare — makes no bones about the fact Republicans want to “do away with Medicare and Medicaid,” and he’s “just the guy to do it.” Just watch:

Please send out the link to this video on Twitter and post it to Facebook, and email it to anyone who still thinks Republicans running for elective office are compassionate. Because people need to see what Republicans say when they tell the truth for a change about their plans for the future of our nation and its people.

So, this happened, and it was awesome:

This also happened, and was also awesome.

Still can’t believe the penis joke.

John Boehner is now talking about Romney’s chances in Ohio in the past tense, as in, he’s already lost.

“One of the things that probably worked against Romney in Ohio is the fact that Gov. Kasich has done such a good job of fixing government regulations in the state, attracting new businesses to the state, so our unemployment rate in Ohio is lower than the national average.”

Boehner did preface that comment by saying that the election will be close in Ohio, but that doesn’t change his verdict.

Meanwhile, Herman Cain had this to say about Mitt Romney:

Cain said he would have been doing better if he was the nominee, saying that he’d probably have a “substantial lead” on President Barack Obama at this point.

“The reason is quite simple: I have some depth to my ideas,” he said.

Meanwhile, Princeton University’s elections expert Prof. Sam Wang now gives the Democrats a 74% chance of winning the House with median of a 16 seat majority. That’s much more bullish than I’m willing to be, but it is one more piece of evidence that the Republican side is crumbling under the weight of their own Stupid.

Not only that, but Nate Silver is now acknowledging that polls that actually call people will cell phones are unanimous that Obama has a big lead, that his convention bounce is not fading, and that Romney is basically hoping for something bad to happen because he no longer has any realistic chance of winning otherwise.

My working assumption for over a year has been that this election would follow a familiar pattern in American politics. We elect presidents, and then we either fire them or we give them a rousing endorsement. If you ignore 2004, you have to go back into the the 19th-Century to find a counterexample. The only exception to this rule in the 20th-Century was when FDR ran for his third and fourth terms, but the circumstances of those elections were so exceptional that we can’t draw any conclusions from them. In any case, it would be nearly impossible for any president to improve on FDR’s performance in 1936, in which he won over 60% of the vote an his opponent was left with 8 electoral votes. Considering that running for a third-term was controversial and ultimately led to a constitutional amendment precluding such a possibility, it is no wonder that FDR did worse in 1940 and 1944 than he did in 1936.

Almost all pundits, whether they be conservatives, progressives, or corporate-paid in-betweens, have been predicting that this election would either follow the example of 2004 when an incumbent was reluctantly given a second term or the example of 1992 when a president was tossed out because of a weak economy. I have never believed that either scenario was likely.

The reason, in addition to history, is the massive differential in quality between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and the massive differential in the popularity of the truthful positions for which they stand. I have had faith that both quality and truth will ultimately win out in this election. And I believe that that is what we are starting to see. I also believe that if we were still operating in a Fairness Doctrine era, Obama would be clearly ahead in at least forty states. If Obama were white, we had sensible campaign finance laws, and we were operating in an era without the controversy over Roe v. Wade, I believe that Obama would be leading in 49 or 50 states. Even with our economic difficulties, the difference in quality and platform between the two candidates and the two parties is so massive, that only an enormous right-wing media wurlitzer, huge corporate funding, a strong anti-choice movement, and latent racism are keeping Romney competitive at all.

And, yet, despite all these fingers on the scale, Obama is probably going to beat Romney worse than he beat McCain. I predict that before long, we will see a couple of states that no one thought would be in play are polling neck-and-neck, and I predict Obama will win one or more of them.

I can’t say that I predicted that Romney would be a dunce about an assassination in Libya or that a video of one of his fundraisers would emerge and damage his candidacy. No one can predict anything with that kind of specificity. What I predicted is that the quality differential between the candidates would show up and make a decisive difference in the campaign, and that the American people would reelect Obama with enthusiasm.

I believe that is what is what we are witnessing right now. That is what is unfolding before our eyes as we speak.

I used to live in Venice, California. In fact, I lived there when we invaded Panama for no discernible reason and killed a bunch of people for no obvious principle. To this day, I don’t think 99% of Americans know why Manuel Noreiga suddenly became unacceptable to our foreign policy elites after decades of doing their bidding. But I digress.

Living in Venice can give you the comfortable impression that everyone is to the left of our two established political parties and that no one with any integrity would get in bed with either of them. That’s what living in Venice seems to have done to Conor Friedersdorf, but he needs to wake up. I am tired of the purity trolls. If you can accurately identify the pathologies of the modern GOP and expound on them at length, then you’ve lost the right to be above it all. It really is that simple.

I can forgive people who do not recognize the unprecedented danger the modern GOP poses to our country and the world, but I cannot forgive people who are totally cognizant of that danger and nonetheless say “to hell with both parties.” Those people are worse than ostriches. They are enablers.

You want to know what can go to hell? Godwin’s Law.

Anyone who looked honestly at the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and then said “to hell with the Weimar Republic” was guilty of the same kind of purity trolling. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing not because the modern GOP is about to round up all the homosexuals or gypsies or mental incompetents and blast them with Zyklon B. It’s because the modern GOP is xenophobic, hyper-nationalistic, in constant search of scapegoats, and intent on embroiling us in ill-considered wars. They are a party that is obsessed with fecundity, that is obsessed with the racial purity of the country, that is completely in bed with the corporate industrialists that fund them. They have spent the last two years working on two projects with unremitting tenacity: forcing unwanted probes up women’s vaginas and disenfranchising blacks and Latinos.

At this point, I don’t care if it is supposed to be impermissible to talk about Nazis in American politics. Mitt Romney’s campaign is built around nothing if not the Big Lie. The president ended the work requirement for welfare, cut Medicare benefits to pay for Obamacare, and went on a global Apology Tour in 2009. Half the country is on the government dole, and minorities are sucking the lifeblood out of the nation’s economy. Homosexuals caused 9/11 and Katrina and undermined the battle-readiness of our troops. Climate change doesn’t exist and evolution is a myth. Man once co-existed with dinosaurs.

At some point, you have to stop pretending that the modern GOP isn’t using about 95% of Josef Goebbel’s playbook and take a stand. You don’t just stand above it all and say, “but what about the drones?” You don’t get to do that. This is an extremely dangerous ideology that we are dealing with that is daily doing everything it can to make Americans hate each other and everyone in the world who isn’t an American. It spreads ignorance and intolerance and anti-intellectualism and militarism and violence. It no longer has any redeeming qualities. If you can identify all these problems and tendencies, you forfeit the right to adopt an indifferent attitude about the elections. If you say “to hell with both sides” then to hell with you.