What to watch for on Tuesday

I'm not sure how much any network will devote to coverage of a single race -- I'm sure there will be a crawl -- but my guess is coverage will be in the context of whatever shows happen to normally be on. Anyway, in terms of what to watch for, there haven't been a lot of close races in Massachusetts lately, and the most recent state-wide race of note that might be informative is the 2002 Governor race, between Mitt Romney and Shannon O'Brien. There was no incumbent in Man (R) v. Woman (D), and the Man looked like a politician, while the Woman was forgettable as a candidate. The mood in the country favored Republicans. Of course, one major difference (and a lot of other things, I'm sure, that don't fit this glossing over) is that there are greater national implications in this current Senate race.

Going back to the returns from that race, Romney won with 49.8% of the vote to O'Brien's 44.9%. I chose 23 decently-sized cities and towns that at least vaguely mirrored that result, with the idea that, as returns come in, they can serve as a decent barometer for the overall election. For this table, I removed all votes for third party candidates and normalized to just votes for Romney and O'Brien.

Obama comes to town tomorrow, speaking at Northeastern. I'll be watching football.


The percentage is what Romney received. So, if these results are predictive, Coakley needs to do >3% better than O'Brien in each town in order to win.

Don't blame me, I voted for Capuano

Jesus, she is horrible:

In a radio interview Martha Coakley (D) claimed that Red Sox great Curt Schilling was a Yankee fan.

While I'm now beginning to understand why her handlers shoved her in a steamer trunk after winning the primary, I still have no idea why anyone was driven to vote for her back in December.

Staying at 60

It is safe to say that panic has set in here in the Bay State (Bay Commonwealth, actually) regarding the Kennedy Senate seat. Scott Brown is a Mitt Romney clone, in that he's a good looking guy whom no one knows what he really thinks, or if he has actual opinions at all, and thus is a good vessel for a vote-the-bums-out election. On the other side you have Martha Coakley, who has run a horrible campaign since winning the Democratic primary in December. And by "horrible campaign" I mean "didn't campaign at all for a month." To be honest, I'm not really sure how she won the primary: as soon as polling started, she was well ahead and the other candidates could never overcome her giant lead, but I have no idea why she has so far ahead to begin with. I mean, being state attorney general must give you some name recognition, but initial polls had her beating her opponents by 20+ points. And it certainly wasn't her TV ads, which were, at best, non-offensive and could certainly be categorized as annoying.

Anyways, voting is next Tuesday. Current polls vary between a decent Coakley win (high single digits) to a narrow Brown win (a point or two). Nate Silver had a good point the other day, noting that those who would say anything but a Coakley blow-out is a loss for the Democrats need to look at previous elections in this state -- it is really only in Presidential elections that Massachusetts is a no-brainer, as Republicans tend to keep Congressional and Gubernatorial elections decently close (indeed, winning a latter a good chunk of the time).

The Kennedy seat is a class I seat, meaning that whomever wins it won't be up for re-election until 2012. If Coakley wins -- and I really hope she does, not because I think she'll be even a remotely successful Senator but rather because I'm confident that Scott Brown will do whatever Mitch McConnell tells him to do -- I hope she receives a strong challenge in '12.

Know thy drinking

From a community message board:

Wanted: Clean(ish) beer bottles So I'm looking for empty beer bottles for home brews. I simply dont drink enough to create enough empties. They dont need to be clean, but free of cigarette butts at least.

WTF are you doing making your own beer if you readily admit that you don't drink a lot of beer? So, lemme guess, you're going to be the guy who brings his homemade beer to parties and makes everyone drink it and pretend to like it, while agreeing with you about the balance of hops and malts. Oh yeah, and then there's the lovely yeast particles that come with every sip from the final 2/3 of the bottle, because your beer isn't filtered. Thanks.

"What may be true, I say not yes or no"

Well, in times of sorrow, the internet provides succor. An entire Shakespearean take on The Big Lebowski:

THE KNAVE A care-crazed father of a many children; it is a wise father that knows his own child. An excellent list for a man of no doubt excellent issue. BRANDT An amiable jest! Nay, I’d call’d his children his, but they come not of his loins, thou understand’st. THE KNAVE A cuckold, he? BRANDT A most subtle jest! Nay, but children of the inner city, of good promise, resolved to study but without the means. My lord resolves that they will all attend the university.

Institutional fail

While many have been lamenting the failings of the institutional structure that is the US Senate, there is no more dysfunctional collection of humans on the planet than the Baseball Writers Association of America, as evidenced today by their Hall of Fame voting.

Andre Dawson, the Hawk, finally got in, on his 9th year of eligibility. He should have been in years ago. He not only had a long career and accumulated excellent numbers, but also was an elite player for a stretch, culminating in an MVP award while playing for a last place team, a truly rare accomplishment. He had very few peers while he played, no doubt. So what the hell took so long to put him in? Or, more specifically, can a writer who previously voted against Dawson elucidate some coherent reason why he changed his mind? No, such an individual couldn't make a rational argument without sounding like a sommelier with a blindfold on explaining why Two Buck Chuck is worthy of a 95 Wine Spectator rating, $100 price tag, and should be cellared for at least 10 years before drinking.

Even more egregious is leaving out Robbie Alomar. He was the best second basemen in baseball, by a longshot, for the better part of two decades. Offense catalyst on an excellent Blue Jays team that won consecutive World Series. Stellar defense. Piled up great numbers over a long time, and, like Dawson, could legitimately claim, at least for a stretch, to be an answer to the 'if you had one guy to build your team around' question.

Everyone is above average!

In case anyone was worried that Ivy League students weren't getting enough self-esteem given to them on a platter, I just want to assure you that grade inflation is alive and well here in Boston.

Lean n' Mean

As someone who has spent an inordinate amount of time focusing on the written word, this piece by Michael Kinsley resonated. Not only is he explicitly bashing the vapid nature of writing in 'top' newspapers, he is also implicitly imploring people to remember Strunk and White. For example:

The Times piece, by contrast, waits until the third paragraph to quote Representative George Miller, who said, “This is our moment to revolutionize health care in this country.” That is undeniably true. If there was ever a moment to revolutionize health care, it would be the moment when legislation revolutionizing health care has just passed. But is this news? Did anybody say to anybody else, “Wait’ll you hear what George Miller just said”? The quote is 11 words, while identifying Miller takes 16. And there’s more: “Now is the chance to fix our health care system and improve the lives of millions of Americans,” Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the Rules Committee, said as she opened the daylong proceedings. (Quote: 18 words; identification: 21 words.)

and this:

The software industry has a concept known as “legacy code,” meaning old stuff that is left in software programs, even after they are revised and updated, so that they will still work with older operating systems. The equivalent exists in newspaper stories, which are written to accommodate readers who have just emerged from a coma or a coal mine. Who needs to be told that reforming health care (three words) involves “a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system” (nine words)? Who needs to be reminded that Hillary Clinton tried this in her husband’s administration without success? Anybody who doesn’t know these things already is unlikely to care. (Is, in fact, unlikely to be reading the article.)

Beltre

Last night the Sox agreed to a one year deal (with a player option for a second) with Adrian Beltre, 3B formerly of the Mariners and Dodgers. He's okay with a bat, but apparently he was signed for his glove. To summarize several thousands posts on Sons of Sam Horn, you can win more games by either scoring more runs or preventing more runs, and the Sox seem to have decided that the more cost-effective way is to pursue the latter. Indeed, this off-season they acquired a big name pitcher (Lackey) while signing two position players with excellent gloves (Beltre, Cameron) while not really pursuing two sluggers, Jason Bay & Matt Holliday. At least in theory, the theory is sound. By several fielding algorithms, the Red Sox have a chance to be a historically good run prevention team.

My concern is that, last year, the Sox were woeful not at scoring runs (they were 3rd in the AL, and 872 runs is a lot of runs) but in scoring runs against good pitching. Basically, they beat up on bad pitching but were stymied by good pitching -- and while this is true across the league (it is what defines the good and bad pitching!) the Sox differential was far more extreme than most teams. The lack of hitting is what sealed their fate against the Angels, as they scored exactly 1 run in the first two playoff games. So one is left wondering if that differential is something that is predictable going forward or was just a fluke.

Trees are so communist

"I’d prefer to do energy because I think you could get a really broad consensus on a lot of energy legislation,” said Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.)
Via Politico, Mark Pryor tries to shine his 'centrist' (read: 'moron') credentials by explaining why climate change legislation isn't feasible in 2010. I wonder how Mark Pryor thinks energy legislation differs from cap and trade....

A little while back another centrist, Mary Landreix of LA, justified tabling climate change legislation because, well, health care reform has been a lot of hard work. Does that excuse work anywhere but the US Senate? "Gee boss, I'd love to work on this next project, I really would, but the last one was hard, so I'd rather just spend the rest of this Congress voting aye on puppy dogs and nay on burnt toast"

My CSA is bigger than yours

As one often does with Wikipedia, looking up one things leads you to something entirely different. I came across a table of the Combined Statistical Areas of the United States, defined as "an aggregate of adjacent Core Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs) that are linked by commuting ties" and is also the "the most expansive of the metropolitan area concepts employed by the OMB." I suppose a shorthand way of approximating this is, which NFL team does the network always show you on Sunday.

Anyway, I surprised to see Boston ranking much higher than I would have thought, coming in at number 5:

1) New York-Newark-Bridgeport
2) Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside
3) Chicago-Naperville-Michigan City
4) Washington DC-Baltimore-Northern Virginia
5) Boston-Worcester-Manchester

For comparison, Houston-Baytown-Huntsville ranks #9. If you were to look at a city based purely on its population, Houston is #4 and Boston is way down at #21. But, perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of people live near but not in Boston, while outside of the urban sprawl that is Houston, there is nothing. Certainly this matters when it comes to things like investing in transit infrastructure.

Sheldon Whitehouse, Senator from Rhode Island, makes this point:

When it turns out there are no death panels, when there is no bureaucrat between you and your doctor, when the ways your health care changes seem like a good deal to you, and a pretty smart idea, when the American public sees the discrepancy between what really is, and what they were told by the Republicans, there will be a reckoning. There will come a day of judgment about who was telling the truth.

I'd like this to be true, but isn't the whole problem right now that objective reality just keeps receding from view? Won't Fox News just run scary stories about grannies dying because of the health care bill (which doesn't take effect until 2014, but never mind that)? Is there any reason to believe that the Republicans won't just double-down on obstruction, while hoping and praying that the economy continues to recover slowly so they can win back some seats in 2010?

Speaking of which, thanks to the Club for Growth for getting a burr so far up Arlen Specter's ass that he switched to the Democrats. Do you really think he'd have voted for this bill if there was an (R) next to his name?

That's unpossible

If you know of any scientists, or even happen to be a scientist yourself, then you'll know that the best part about publishing papers is not the sense of self-satisfaction, or of increasing knowledge in the world, or even the career benefits. No, it is the subsequent emails from ESL (English as a Second Language) folks that will eventually arrive. For example, there's this, from a colleague who most decidedly has a female name:

Dear Sir, Please send me following your article for personal use which is intersting for me

Will health care cover implants?

Over the weekend, Tom Coburn, Senator from Oklahoma, said "What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can’t make the vote tonight. That’s what they ought to pray." It might be a bit harsh to read into this statement that he was actually wishing for someone to, say, die, but maybe just lock themselves out of the Senate or something.

So my question is, since that didn't happen and all 58 Democrats plus Sanders and [shudder] Lieberman made it to vote aye, has Coburn modified his thinking to reflect either:

a) Americans chose not to pray against health care reform, and thus he has misread the mood of Americans

or

b) Americans did pray but God wants health care reform, so He didn't smite Barbara Mikulsky.

I suppose option c would be that Coburn is a homophobic (1) and insane (2) grandstanding blowhard, but this is the US Senate, so we can just dismiss that possibility out of hand.

(1): “the gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country, and they wield extreme power. [The gay] agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today.”

(2): "And I thought I would just share with you what science says today about silicone breast implants. If you have them, you're healthier than if you don't. That is what the ultimate science shows. . . . In fact, there's no science that shows that silicone breast implants are detrimental and, in fact, they make you healthier."

Shamrock-shake-induced behavior, no doubt.

Yglesias hits a point I made the other day:

What’s needed to regain footing, I think, is a different kind of issue. An issue where it makes sense to draw lines, pick a fight, and if the votes aren’t there to pass a strong bill just say to the public “we were out there fighting for you and senators x, y, and z killed it.” Swinging for the fences like that, you might actually hit a home run, which would be great. And if not, you energize your allies and make your enemies look bad. At least if you pick the right issue. Financial regulation, it seems to me, would be that issue. In broad terms, the idea of regulating big banks is popular. And substantively speaking, a weak bill that’s full of loopholes would genuinely do very little good. We’re not in imminent danger of a bubble/crash replay but if we do something called “financial regulatory reform” we’re unlikely to do it again until there is a new panic. So there’s a strong case for coming out swinging against denouncing a too-weak bill as a sham and drawing some bright lines. If it doesn’t happen, I’ll do some Taibbi-style denunciations of Geithner & Rahm.

Tentacles unite!

Credit the emperor for being the first person on the internet to notice the brewing octopus uprising. I'm sure he found it in the course of actually thumbing through scientific literature, so the Venemous Bede would be proud of his use of primary sources. And Maniac Mansion was a great video game.

Anyway, here's a video:

Figure 2: Taunting the Octopus

From the ever-valuable Emperor:

Defensive tool use in a coconut-carrying octopus Julian K. Finn1, 2, , Tom Tregenza3, and Mark D. Norman1, 1 Museum Victoria, GPO Box 666, Melbourne, VIC 3001, Australia 2 Zoology, La Trobe University, Bundoora, VIC 3086, Australia 3 CEC, Biosciences, University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus, Penryn TR10 9EZ, UK Summary The use of tools has become a benchmark for cognitive sophistication. Originally regarded as a defining feature of our species, tool-use behaviours have subsequently been revealed in other primates and a growing spectrum of mammals and birds [1]. Among invertebrates, however, the acquisition of items that are deployed later has not previously been reported. We repeatedly observed soft-sediment dwelling octopuses carrying around coconut shell halves, assembling them as a shelter only when needed. Whilst being carried, the shells offer no protection and place a requirement on the carrier to use a novel and cumbersome form of locomotion — ‘stilt-walking’.

John Lackey

31 years old, 5 year deal. Huh. Sons of Sam Horn site completely down.

Angry mob

Via Taegan Goddard, Rolling Stone's Matt Tiabi opines thusly:

What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

If you read Andrew Sullivan enough, you can convince yourself that Obama is a Jedi mind warrior, minus the goat-staring, or perhaps a pre-cog/Oracle type: he sees five moves ahead and he knows the effects of his moves 6 months down the road. Don't get me wrong, I think Obama is a smart guy, but at some point you need to Obama's "patience" on an issue is better explained by "indifference."

I don't think it is too late for Obama to do something about our crappy financial system. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that it is something he does want to do something about, and I think it reasonable to argue that, if health care had been wrapped up by this point, he'd have taken it on by now. But both for the purposes of actually reforming the system, and for the sake of Democrats in 2010, Obama needs to pursuade Congress to make this the high profile issue of 2010 (and it pains me to prioritize it over climate change). From an electoral standpoint, it is a winning issue -- people are pissed at Wall Street, and rightfully so. This would help motivate the base and bring some independents back into the fold. As usual, the place where any legislation like this would die is the Senate, but my gut says that it'll be easier to call Senators bluffs on this than on health care -- nobody wants to be seen as defending Wall Street, whereas at least now you can position yourself as defending seniors or whatnot.

Home on the range

A debate has been raging in the blogosphere lately (no, not really) about the concept of home ownership as an investment. Matt Yglesias verbalized something I've thought for awhile:

I think the clearest way to make the point is just to observe that no matter what happens to the price of your home, it’s very hard to actually take advantage of any gains you may make. Bubbles aside, property values in a given metro area really can separate from the national trend in a fundamental way. Over the past several decades, the Detroit area has become a much less attractive place to live relative to the national average and some other cities have become more attractive relative to others. So you can “make money” by buying property in a city whose attractiveness increases relative to the average. But how are you going to realize these gains? By moving to Detroit?

Indeed, really the only way to play the housing market is to buy your first home when the market is down. But once you're in, well, that's it.

That's not to say that buying a home is a bad idea, compared to the alternative of renting. There are a lot of calculators that you can use to decide rent v. buy, which more or less come down to, well, how long are you gonna be around in place X. Certainly it doesn't make sense to buy a home if there's a good chance you'll be moving in 6 months, as there are a lot of transaction costs. But the longer you'll be in one place, the more sense it makes to buy. If you rent a place for 30 years, at the end of 30 years, you have... nothing. But if you buy that place, at the end of 30 years, you own a home and have no more housing costs to worry about. I don't know if that qualifies as an "investment" per se, but that doesn't mean it is a bad idea.

One thing I would like to see is reform of the tax code, which right now "encourages" (though I have no idea to what degree) home ownership by allowing a deduction of mortgage interest. While I think it would be essentially impossible to eliminate that politically, one thing you could do is instead expand the deduction to also allow people to deduct their rent. Indeed, Massachusetts does this on the state level, although it is still not comparable to the mortgage deduction.

That's fat with an F

If you're the sort of person who has the DVR set up to record the Daily Show every night, make sure you get around to watching last's night show, with Mike Huckabee as the guest. One highlight when Stewart showed a poll that "Fox and Friends" were all excited about (done by Rasmussen, of course) detailing doubt as to the veracity of climate change. The percentages on the poll added up to 120%, so, um, the numbers were made up. Nice.

One item of note... Mike Huckabee has gained a lot of weight. Now, he was a big guy when he was governor, and lost a lot of weight and wrote a book about it. I remember awhile ago people had a theory about Al Gore's weight and his propensity for running for office. I forget how it worked, but that's not the point, because I have no point.

Polling

A new poll by Public Policy Polling asked an interesting question: Who would you rather have as president right now, George W. Bush or Barack Obama? Obama won, but barely, 50% to 44%, with 6% either undecided or unable to successfully press "1" or "2" on their phone. Jeez, I thought, that seems really bad for Obama. So I looked at some other results in their poll, and it seems skewed towards the GOP (I'm not accusing of malfeasance in any way, just saying that their data has a bias). For example, the actual results from the 2008 election has Obama winning 53% to 46%, but when this sample of people was asked who they voted for, it was 47% Obama and 45% McCain, with 8% remaining. So in this sample, Obama voters are under-represented by about 6 percentage points. Further, when you look at the breakdown of McCain voters who still choose Obama over Bush, and Obama voters who would now choose Bush, McCain has a defection rate of 10%, while Obama's is less than 5%. Further, the 8% of people who voted for "someone else" in 2008 (the non-Obama/McCain percentage was actually less than 1%), well, those folks/fools prefer Bush to Obama by a 3.5 - 1 margin, which further biases the data.

By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, when you correct for the sampling bias, you find that greater than 55% of people would prefer Obama to Bush -- so definitely at least equal to and maybe a smidge higher than actually voted for Obama. That sounds about right to me, and now that I think about it, is not cause for concern.

And this is why we're headed down the tubes

From a local site, in regards to yesterday's primaries and the idiocy of the voting public:

Inspector: You are unenrolled. Which ballot would you like, Democratic, Republican or Libertarian? Voter: I’m an independent. Inspector: Yes and you have the choice of any of the three ballots. Would you like, Democratic, Republican or Libertarian? Voter: (angrily) I don’t have to tell you who I’m voting for! Inspector: That’s true, but you do have to decide for today’s primary which party ballot you want. Voter: (raising voice) No, I’m an independent!

Predictions

I looked at the returns after exactly one town in Massachusetts (Southampton) had reported results, and it was 53-29 for Coakley v. Capuano. AP has just called it for Coakley with 44% reporting, and it is Coakley by 48-27. I hope to one day drive through Southampton and see a sign designating it the "Bellweather of Massachusetts."

Too bad, I wanted Capuano. Coakley seemed a bit too boilerplate for me, the sort of person who will get to the Senate and do nothing in order to... get re-elected to the Senate. I hope she proves me wrong.