Friday, November 24, 2006
 

Friday Photography: Mallards


click to enlarge

Daryl Samuel (1994)

Location: Clinton, New Jersey

Previous: Hands With Softball / On Alcatraz / Cameras / Lighthouse / Photographer At Work / Patio Chairs / Greek Church / Santa Fe Mailboxes / Rocking Horse / Sunset Sandpiper / Hands / Bird of Paradise / Feeding the Pelican / Sunset Silhouette / Staircase

Ed Fitzgerald | 11/24/2006 01:35:00 PM | | | del.icio.us | GO: TOP OF HOME PAGE

 

(3089/898) That's living

269) You live on the surface of your life. And you think if you just touch another person's skin, that's living.
Philip Kan Gotanda
Day Standing On Its Head (1993)

270) Wake up Harry. You're dying and the hour is late. The flesh is falling from our bodies. Moments of exquisite perfumed pleasure are slipping away into oblivion [...] Harry, you, this divine animal - what an incredibly intricate piece of imagination beating inside of you. Take it out, take it out and share, dream, I give you permission [...]
Philip Kan Gotanda
Day Standing On Its Head (1993)

271) The Future [...] something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters_(1941)

272) All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
George Orwell
Animal Farm (1946)

273) The theatre needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.
Gore Vidal
quoted in Newsweek (3/25/68) [B16]

274) Off-Off-Broadway is the cutting edge of the knife of theatre.
Ed Fitzgerald (c. 1976)

275) It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens.
Woody Allen
"Death (A Play)" (play) in
Without Feathers (1975) [B16]


Sources

[B16] - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition (1993)



Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 788 days remaining in the administration of the worst President ever.

Ed Fitzgerald | 11/24/2006 01:19:00 PM | | | del.icio.us | GO: TOP OF HOME PAGE


Wednesday, November 22, 2006
 

Bobby misses the boat

Why, I wonder, does Robert Novak have a reputation for political acumen? Take, for instance, the current issue of the Evans-Novak Political Report, in which Novak writes:
Never before has a new speaker entered office on such a sour note as Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Her vigorous and totally rejected campaign for Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) supports widespread cloakroom sentiment that she is not qualified for her high office and is there because of her gender and the support of the huge California delegation.
Does this make any sense at all? Let's see:
  • "Never before..." Never? Not even once before in the entire history of the Republic? I guess I find that a little hard to believe, given the rough-and-tumble nature of American politics during some eras.

    What this is, is a statement made for rhetorical purposes, not a statement of fact or rational analysis.


  • "...has a new speaker entered office..." Gee, Bob, haven't you noticed that Pelosi hasn't entered office yet? Damn, those little details are so darn hard to keep track of, aren't they?


  • So we're supposed to believe that Pelosi was put in office by a bunch of men because she's a woman, and because the California delegation has a lot of clout, but not enough clout, apparently, to elect Murtha to a subsidiary position? Is there a shred of logic to this contention?

    Hey, Robert, sweetie, how about this, darling -- the Democrats elected Pelosi Speaker for the next Congress because she's done a good job as Minority Leader and there was no reason to make a change, and they elected Hoyer not as a rejection of Pelosi, but because more of them preferred Hoyer to Murtha. Whaca think of that, bubby?

    Too complicated, Bob, people voting for the candidate they prefer? We call it democracy, Bobbie, and it's no wonder you forgot what it is and how it works, considering that your people seem to be allergic to it and work their little tushies off trying to undercut and subvert it whenever possible.

Just so everyone recalls, Novak's prediction for the outcome of the election was:

House: Democrats 222 - Republicans 213
Senate: Democrats 47 - Republicans 53

Wooooo-eeee, that's some good predictin', Bobby boy. Congrats especially on that Senate, thing, hon.

Ed Fitzgerald | 11/22/2006 12:45:00 PM | | | del.icio.us | GO: TOP OF HOME PAGE


Tuesday, November 21, 2006
 

Robert Altman

I just learned about the death, from cancer, of Robert Altman. Although his work was very inconsistent, he was still one of my favorite filmmakers. While films such as M*A*S*H and Nashville are sure to be cited as his best, I also enjoyed the light entertainments like Cookie's Fortune, The Player, and Gosford Park. But I think the film that most mesmerized me was 3 Women, which I've seen numerous times and have never really figured out. I also like his deconstruction of the hard-boiled detective movie, The Long Goodbye, quite a bit, despite the critical drubbing it received for daring to undercut an iconic American character like Chandler's Philip Marlow.

(I will note, however, that I saw Nashville again recently and it didn't quite hold up, although the ending still had a lot of impact. Still, it raises the question of how Altman's work will be perceived by future generations. It may be that one had to come of age in a certain period of American social turmoil to truly appreciate his work.)

Ed Fitzgerald | 11/21/2006 09:36:00 PM | | | del.icio.us | GO: TOP OF HOME PAGE

 

(3089/898) Socio/science stuff

265) University of California at Berkeley [...] anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay [...] showed that the color terms used by diverse societies all follow a systematic pattern. That is, if a society has only two color terms, these terms will divide the spectrum between black and white; if a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red; if it contains four terms, the it contains a term for green or yellow (but not both) and so on to the most complete languages which contain eleven basic color terms (white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, pink, purple, orange, and gray). [...] But some anthropologists feel that the conclusions drawn by Berlin and Kay are too broad. John Bousfield, for example, suggests that it is one thing to know that the color spectrum is divided into two segments, but quite another to translate the terms into "black" and "white." In his view, such a pair of terms would acquire far more meaning (since they are the only ways to talk about colors) then they do in a multicolor-term culture [...]
Howard Gardner
The Mind's New Science (1985)
citing Berlin, B. and Kay, P. Basic Color Terms:
Their Universality and Evolution
(1969) and
Bousfield, J. The World Seen As A Color Chart (1979)

266) Whenever there is a simple error that most laymen fall for, there is always a slightly more sophisticated version of the same problem that experts fall for.
Amos Tversky
possibly from Tversky, A. and Kahnmen, D.
"Extensional vs. Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction
Fallacy in Probability Judgment" (1983)
quoted by Howard Gardner in
The Mind's New Science (1985)

267) People seem to have little difficulty in accepting the modifiability of "environmental" effects on human development. If a child has had bad teaching in mathematics, it is accepted that the resulting deficiency can be remedied by extra good teaching the following year. But any suggestion that the child's mathematical deficiency might have a genetic origin is likely to be greeted with something approaching despair: if it is in the genes "it is written", it is "determined" and nothing can be done about it; you might as well give up attempting to teach the child mathematics. This is pernicious rubbish on an almost astrological scale. Genetic causes and environmental causes are in principal no different from each other. Some influences of both type may be hard to reverse; others may be easy to reverse. Some may be usually hard to reverse but easy if the right agent is applied. The important point here is that there is no general reason for expecting genetic influences to be any more irrevocable than environmental ones.
Richard Dawkins
The Extended Phenotype (1982)

268) [W]ith the rise of many scientists to prominence in our nation's life, something was triggered in the American response which is perhaps idiosyncratic for this country but in fact is fundamentally healthy - namely, skepticism against this, as against any, form of strong, organized authority. As the astute political scientist Don K. Price has pointed out, Americans tend to have a special response to science, one that has roots in our ingrained political philosophy. From the beginning, the predominant attitude toward any large-scale organized authority in the United States has been essentially negative, and our political institutions are set up with the purpose of impeding the assertion of centralized authority as much as possible. In the first century and a half of the Republic, scientists and engineers were seen as outsiders, even as a force against established authority, as challengers of all dogma and successors of the religious dissenters who founded this country [...] But, Price says, "during the past generation there has been a sharp break with this tradition." As scientists have become far more numerous and their work, directly or indirectly, has begun to change our daily lives, they have come to be identified not with dissent but with authority. Thus, although science itself is still seen as a positive force by a majority of Americans, scientists - who have been slow to understand this reaction - have become increasingly targets of suspicion.
Gerald Holton
Science and Anti-Science (1993)
citing Don K. Price
America's Unwritten Constitution (1983)



Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 791 days remaining in the administration of the worst President ever.

Ed Fitzgerald | 11/21/2006 02:29:00 PM | | | del.icio.us | GO: TOP OF HOME PAGE

 

Keeling: Calculating our priorities

Roger Keeling has an interesting idea on how to generate a priority list for Democratic action:
Dear Ed,

I provide this link to a Kevin Drum posting from a few days ago because I think it's good common sense. But, more, it inspired an idea that -- were I even vaguely capable in mathematics and computer programming -- I'd be very inclined to put into action myself, just to see if it ultimately proved of value.

It seems to me that with some simple polling (or perhaps even just a close reading of the stated positions of all Democrats in the next Congress), combined with an application of Set Theory, you could pretty easily arrive at a priority list that would maximize the probability of successful passage of a vast range of Democratic policies while minimizing intra-Party friction ... _and_ minimizing the odds of the public turning against the Democrats in 2008.

I dunno, maybe this is nothing new. Maybe one or more mathematicians have done this in the past. But if so, I've never heard of it. I've never, for example, seen an illustration of it in, say, the textbooks I used to have on political game theory, which are nothing but mathematics.

So, if I had the brain for it, here's what I'd do, stated here on the off-chance that someone else -- someone who _does_ have head for math and programming -- might be inspired to act.

Start with one of your elaborate compilations of public opinion surveys, only this one being of what the public broadly claims to believe about various issues. Which issues are most salient to the general public? Which are the highest in priority? There's a big difference between those two things. For example, a substantial majority favor tough gun control laws. But they favor it, most of them, the way we favor world peace and an end to the illicit drug trade: "Gee, wouldn't it be a good thing if ..." On the other hand, folks who oppose gun controls REALLY oppose them. They aren't a majority or even very close to one, but because they can quickly become single-issue voters, they wield a lot of power. In short, they have high salience on this issue; taking it on can consume a _lot_ of political capital, especially if it's something you're likely to alienate a lot of your own erstwhile supporters over.

So anyhow, you list every issue you might imagine -- the Iraq War, national health care, gun control, raising the minimum wage, corporate reforms, abortion rights, and so forth -- and to each, you assign a composite image of what the public, nationally, thinks about them ... along with a composite "salience" calculation. So, for example, I'd bet that the Iraq war will stay right at the top where, most of us on the left, believe it to be and believe it deserves to be; that's because a substantial majority of the public are fed up with the direction, and they feel pretty strongly about it. Gun control would probably fall pretty far on the list, very nearly to the bottom.

That's one set.

To build the second set, you examine the stated national issues of concern to each Democratic Senator or Congressman. How does each of these elected leaders stand on the issues? How high is the salience of the issue to each of these people (perhaps one of the hardest -- or at least most subjective -- values to determine)? How about his or her constituents -- where do they, overall, stand on it? (Perhaps this is two numbers: overall public opinion _and_ the opinion of Democratic voters in his or her state or district). So, Casey of Pennsylvania is anti-abortion, and it might be of high personal salience to him, but probably isn't a key issue or his state's voters (indeed, many probably voted for him despite rather than because of his views on this). Tester, on the other hand, is very pro-gun rights, has high salience on it, and would get his butt kicked out of office if he crossed that. So ... mix all of this information together, and you come up with your second set.

Finally, the most subjective consideration of all: what issues can realistically be dealt with, with or without nearly unified Democratic support. A national healthcare plan ought to be in the cards, for example -- God, I'd give anything for it -- but, realistically, it might have no chance at all with Bush in the White House and Republicans still very powerful in the Senate (hence able to kill legislation with
filibusters and / or by merely attracting a stray Democrat or two to their position). Election reform and a better energy plan, however, might be issues that Bush would have a harder time blocking.

Anyhow, this is your third set.

Now crunch them altogether, and a rational priority list should emerge. Not perfect, not something to completely substitute for the experienced judgment of Democratic political leaders, but a lot better than the black box they use to figure out these things now (e.g., every member of Congress dropping things into the hopper, and all the committee leaders mostly exercise their own biases with little outside guidance).

I'm not suggesting that Henry Waxman or Charles Rangel or anyone else up there is going to allow a computer program to dictate what they do. But if all or most of these leaders are convinced that this would maximize ultimate effectiveness -- and, thus, their re-election prospects -- then they might be very inclined to give heavy value to such a priority list.

In truth, people like Reid and Pelosi already try to do this anyhow. I'm just inclined to think that a way to let a computer generate such a priority list might be recognized as a useful -- powerful -- tool.
I don't think I've ever seen a suggestion similar to what Roger's presented here, and I'd be interested in hearing if anyone's done something like it before.

Of course, I think resistance to a list generated in this manner would be high among the party leaders (who might feel that their perogatives were being usurped and their authority threatend), but it would still be useful for some progressive organization to put it together and find out what the exercise comes up with: perhaps the list would be just the right kernel for Democratic action to coalesce around.

Ed Fitzgerald | 11/21/2006 02:06:00 PM | | | del.icio.us | GO: TOP OF HOME PAGE


Monday, November 20, 2006
 

How the Democratic Party works

There's an interesting piece on the structure of the Democratic Party, in particular the relationship of the various state parties to the National Committee, on The Next Hurrah. [Link fixed]

My only objection is that while it's certainly true that, structurally, the DNC is a creature of the state parties, the writer rather overlooks the real-world fact that the DNC's constituency is a lot broader than that (as it pretty much has to be if the DNC is going to be an effective instrument for the Party), and includes, at its largest extent, all Democrats, including even idiots and assholes like James Carville. While it's true that it's the state parties who elect the head of the DNC, they don't exist in a vaccuum, and are subject to the same kind of spin and propaganda and persuasion that we all are subjected to. If Carville's stupid trial balloon had generated a lot of anti-Dean fervor among Democrats (which it didn't, as far as I can tell), that could well have caused problems for Dean whether or not Carville has any real actual say in who the head of the DNC should be. That is, after all, how guys like Carville get things done, through manipulation and suggestion, not through any direct power.

Update: Chris Bowers says that Carville's attempted coup is dead in the water, and the 50-state strategy is safe for the moment.

Ed Fitzgerald | 11/20/2006 03:22:00 AM | | | del.icio.us | GO: TOP OF HOME PAGE


Sunday, November 19, 2006
 

A comment from Charlie Cook

I received a comment by Charlie Cook, the well-known political analyst, concerning my Election Projections Survey:
For the life of me I cannot understand why, when a political analyst produces a range for their prediction of election results, Ed Fitzgerald would arbitarily pick the lowest number of the range. Logic would suggest that if a fair-minded person were going to reduce a range to a single number, they would pick the mid-point in that range.

My predections were, 4-6 seat loss for Republicans in the Senate (the midpoint would be 5, the final result was 6), a GOP loss of 6-8 governorships (midpoint 7, final 6) and 20-35 in the House (midpoint 27.5, as of 11/19, it is 29).

Is someone wants to quibble about us being off by one seat in the Senate and governorships and 1.5 seats off in the House, fine, go ahead, but to pick the lowest number in a range is methodologically nonsense and grossly unfair.
I responded:
Mr. Cook:

Thank you for your note.

I did not approach this election as a non-partisan analyst, I approached it as a very concerned Democrat (as I clear stated in my explanatory notes) with a vital interest in understanding what was likely to happen in the election. As such, and since I included prediction of both partisan and non-partisan analyists, I did not want to be lulled by perhaps overly optimistic predictions of a Democratic win, I wanted instead as conservative an estimate of what would occur as possible.

This is why I decided to use the lower number whenever an analyst provided a range of numbers except when the analyst specifically flagged a number in the middle of the range as the most likely result, in which case I used that number.

(In the penultimate report of my survey, I also ran the numbers using the highest number in the ranges and found that the resulting averages where not significantly different from those that resulted using the lower estimates. This was because only a few analysts -- 9 to be exact -- resorted to ranges instead of specific projections. [Correction: Although 9 analysts had ranges, only 4 of them, including Cook, did not indicate a preferred number for the House pick-ups.])

Larry Sabato, for instance, in his prediction for the House had a range of 25-33, but said that 29 was the most probable, so I used 29 for his line. If you thought that the most likely outcome within your range of 20-35 was something close to the midpoint of that range ( 27 or 28 ), perhaps you might have made that clear in your report.

I will concede this, however, that in my aftermath report, I did not make the conceptual leap to change from the conservative prediction model I had been using before the election to one designed to best represent the projection of each analyst, and so I simply re-used the same numbers I had used before. (The chart was, basically, simply a re-sort of the previous one.) I regert that error, and I will make an effort to correct in when I re-do the chart again -- which I plan to do once all the House races are decided.

As for the contention that the midpoint best represents your prediction, I'm not sure I totally agree with you. 27.5, after all, is the midpoint not only of your prediction (20-35), but also of an infinite number of other predictions: 19-36, 18-37, 17-38, 16-39 etc. If Joe Blogger had predicted a Democratic gain of 14-41 seats, would you believe that he should be credited with the same accuracy as you, simply because your projections both shared a midpoint of 27.5?

But, really, it seems to me that the best way to insure that your predictions aren't mispresented is to make them a little more specific and less broadly general. A 15 seat range, after all, is hardly the model of pinpoint accuracy.
One correction: Mr. Cook's prediction of a 20-35 seat pick-up by the Democrats encompasses 16 different possible outcomes, and not 15.

Since Mr. Cook didn't state a preference for any particular result within his fairly broad range as being more likely than any other (and such a choice would not necessarily have to be the mid-point, since the possible outcomes could, conceivably, be weighted, with some more likely than others), than all the results are fair fodder for analysis. If the pick-up had been 20 seats, surely Mr. Cook would be claimiing some measure of success for having included that within his predicted range, just as he would have if the result had been 35 seats. With that in mind, I don't see that using 20 seats for his prediction in an effort to generate a conservative projection of the election's likely results can be considered a gross misrepresentation.

Update: I was a little perplexed about what brought Mr. Cook's attention to my survey after all this time, and provoked his ire in the process, but perhaps it was this.

Update: I've had a reply via e-mail from Mr. Cook. I don't as yet have permission to quote directly from it, but it basically said that I shouldn't use his numbers in the future if I was going to misrepresent them. He also pointed out that he became aware of my survey through journalism.org, presumably the post I referred to above, and suggested, somewhat sarcastically, that this was an example of "excellence in journalism". (If Mr. Cook responds with permission, I'll post his e-mail here in full. [See below. - Ed])

My reply was this:
I'm sorry, your reply assumes that I have misrepresented your figures, and I don't believe that is the case, for reasons that I think I've adequately explained. In any event, your figures are publicly available, and as long as they remain so, I will continue to use them in any way that I deem appropriate.

Since you have been kind enough to offer me advice, please allow me to reciprocate. My suggestion to you, is that you might consider working a bit harder to provide predictions that are more specific and less broad and general, since it opens you up to the suspicion that you are deliberately playing it safe and hedging your bets. That's understandable, I suppose, but you are a professional analyst (the dean, according to some) who supposedly understands the political process better than most, with inside information and insight drawn from experience, and yet your predictions were so broad as to be practically useless, and you didn't end up doing all that much better than many amateur analysts.

Finally, if you believe that the failings, whatever they may be, of journalism.com are the sine qua non of the criminal lack of journalistic excellence in our political media, I suggest you take a giant step backwards and reconsider the contemporary media landscape, which includes the preference for conventional wisdom over skeptical inquiry, the dissemination of partisan received ideas in the guise of neutral reporting, collusion with official leaking for obvious political purposes, the profusion of anonymous sourcing even by outlets that in theory disallow it, print journalists doubling as pundits on TV, and steganography masquerading as reporting. It's a cesspool that in no way serves the vital function that the fourth estate was intended to provide, of keeping the public informed and acting as a brake on the use and misuse of government power. That a minor website repeated the, perhaps, errant work of an even more insignificant blogger, just doesn't stack up against that, however annoyed you personally might be about it.
Update: As I said above, I wasn't planning on doing another chart until the House races had been decided, but given Mr. Cook's objections to my representation of his election prediction (objections which have some validity in regards to my aftermath chart, if not in respect to the pre-election survey reports), I decided to re-run the chart, using the midpoint to represent Mr. Cook's prediction, as well as the prediction of the 3 other sites (Kos, Tradesports and Rothenberg) which also gave ranges without specifying a likely result.)

Comparison of this chart with the original one shows that of the 4 sites that had their numbers changed, Kos improved the most, moving from the middle of the pack to just above the Nov 9th estimate of what the final result may be, Rothenberg moved from close to that estimate to farther away from it (above), and Tradesports and Cook moved from the bottom third to the middle third, still well away from the jackpot. (Cook, specifically, moved from the top of the bottom third to the middle of the middle third, moving up 7 slots.)

So if Mr. Cook's ire stems from how I "misrepresented" his House prediction in a way that understated its accuracy, it doesn't seem that using his preferred representation, utilizing the mid-point of his range, really does an awful lot to salvage it. He still comes in significantly far away from whatever the final result ends up being, bettered by other professionals as well as inexperienced and unheralded amateurs.


click for a larger view

[click on the chart for a larger view]


Update: Mr. Cook responded to curtly deny permission to post his e-mail. Given the policy stated in the sidebar -- "All e-mail received is subject to being published on unfutz without identifying names or addresses." -- I don't actually need his permission to publish it, but, what the heck, I don't want to be petty about it. In any case, my 51-word description above of his 58-word e-mail more than adequately conveys its content. If questions should come up about its actual contents in the future, I'll reconsider my decision and publish it should it seem advisable.

Update: On Election Day night, after the exit polls were available to the networks, but before actual results came out, Charlie Cook, interviewed on MSNBC by Chris Matthews, said that if someone told him that his estimate of 20-35 was wrong, he'd bet that it was low, that 35+ was more likely than under 20. Asked about his Senate prediction, he said that if it turned out to be 35+ it would be likely that the Democrats would take the Senate, but if it was around 22-25, the Republicans would likely hold on to the Senate.

This illustrates the difficulty of crediting Cook with any degree of accuracy, given the broadness and generality of his predictions. It turns out that his overall range, 20-35 will turn out to be correct, since in the unlikely event that all the disputed races so their way the Democrats would pick up exactly 35 seats, but since he now seems to feel that his prediction is best captured by the midpoint of the prediction, 27.5, that will turn out to be low -- how low depends on on how the disputed seats fall out.

Such non-specific punditry is a pretty good example of what I mean by Cook hedging his bets.

One thing is certain, though -- regardless of how accurate or non-specific Mr. Cook's predictions should turn out to be, we'll still be seeing him on TV interviewed by the likes of Matthews and Russert, while the amateurs who did as well or somewhat better than him will likely be nowhere to be found.

Update (12/13): Related.

Election Projections Survey

Alan I. Abramowitz study / American Street (Kevin Hayden) / Bafumi-Erikson-Wlezien study / Campaign & Elections (Morgan E. Felchner) / CNN / Cold Hearted Truth / Cook Political Report / CQ Politics / DC's Political Report / Jacob Eisenstein / Election Junkie / Election Predictions / Election Projection / Electoral Vote / Evans-Novak Political Report / Gallup Poll / The Groundhog (George Axiotakis) / Hotline TV / Kos (Daily Kos) / Leip Atlas / Majority Watch / My Election Analysis / MyDD / National Journal Insiders Poll / New York Times / NPR (Ken Rudin) / NRCC/NRSC leaked data / Political Cheat Sheet / Political Forecasting / Politics1 / Pollster.com / Predict06 / Rasmussen / Real Clear Politics / Roll Call / Rothenberg Political Report / Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball / Robert Silvey: Rubicon / Slate / Superribbie / Tapped / Tradesports [Map] / Washington Post Crystal Ball / David Wissing: Hedgehog Report / WSJ/Zogby

Iowa Electronic Markets

Generic House: Polling Report / B-E-W study / Mark Blumenthal / Jay Cost / Charles Franklin / Matt Shugart / unfutz

Wikipedia: Senate / House


Previous reports:
Aftermath (9-Nov) / 7-Nov / 6-Nov / 5-Nov / 4-Nov / 3-Nov / 2-Nov / 1-Nov / 31-Oct / 30-Oct / 29-Oct / 28-Oct / 27-Oct / 26-Oct / 25-Oct / 24-Oct / 23-Oct / 22-Oct / 21-Oct / 20-Oct / 19-Oct / 18-Oct / 17-Oct / 16-Oct

For a permanent link to the survey,
and for explanatory notes, please use:
http://unfutz2.blogspot.com/2006/10/election-projections-survey-master.html.

Ed Fitzgerald | 11/19/2006 10:01:00 PM | | | del.icio.us | GO: TOP OF HOME PAGE







by

Ed Fitzgerald

Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right,
Here I am...
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"I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking."
(Alex Gregory - The New Yorker)
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The greatest good for the greatest number, with dignity for all.
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election prediction
HOUSE
Democrats 230 (+27) - Republicans 205

Actual:
Democrats 233 (+30) - Republicans 201 - TBD 1 [FL-13]

SENATE
Democrats 50 (+5) - Republicans 50

Actual:
Democrats 51 (+6) - Republicans 49

ELECTION PROJECTIONS SURVEY
netroots candidates
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Never a bridesmaid...

...and never a bride, either!!

what I've been reading
Martin van Creveld - The Transformation of War

Jay Feldman - When the Mississippi Ran Backwards

Martin van Creveld - The Rise and Decline of the State

Alfred W. Crosby - America's Forgotten Pandemic (1989)
bush & company are...
absolutist
aggresive
anti-Constitutional
anti-intellectual
arrogant
authoritarian
blame-placers
blameworthy
blinkered
buckpassers
calculating
class warriors
clueless
compassionless
con artists
conniving
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criminal
crooked
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isolated
kleptocratic
lacking in empathy
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liars
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non-rational
not candid
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not trustworthy
oblivious
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out of control
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perverse
philistine
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rapacious
relentless
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selfish
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sleazy
tricky
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uncaring
uncivil
uncompromising
unconstitutional
undemocratic
unethical
unpopular
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unrealistic
unreliable
unrepresentative
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unscrupulous
unsympathetic
venal
vile
virtueless
warmongers
wicked
without integrity
wrong-headed

Thanks to: Breeze, Chuck, Ivan Raikov, Kaiju, Kathy, Roger, Shirley, S.M. Dixon
recently seen
Island in the Sky (1952)

Robot Chicken

The Family Guy

House M.D. (2004-7)
i've got a little list...
Elliott Abrams
Steven Abrams (Kansas BofE)
David Addington
Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson
Roger Ailes (FNC)
John Ashcroft
Bob Bennett
William Bennett
Joe Biden
John Bolton
Alan Bonsell (Dover BofE)
Pat Buchanan
Bill Buckingham (Dover BofE)
George W. Bush
Saxby Chambliss
Bruce Chapman (DI)
Dick Cheney
Lynne Cheney
Richard Cohen
The Coors Family
Ann Coulter
Michael Crichton
Lanny Davis
Tom DeLay
William A. Dembski
James Dobson
Leonard Downie (WaPo)
Dinesh D’Souza
Gregg Easterbrook
Jerry Falwell
Douglas Feith
Arthur Finkelstein
Bill Frist
George Gilder
Newt Gingrich
John Gibson (FNC)
Alberto Gonzalez
Rudolph Giuliani
Sean Hannity
Katherine Harris
Fred Hiatt (WaPo)
Christopher Hitchens
David Horowitz
Don Imus
James F. Inhofe
Jesse Jackson
Philip E. Johnson
Daryn Kagan
Joe Klein
Phil Kline
Ron Klink
William Kristol
Ken Lay
Joe Lieberman
Rush Limbaugh
Trent Lott
Frank Luntz


"American Fundamentalists"
by Joel Pelletier
(click on image for more info)


Chris Matthews
Mitch McConnell
Stephen C. Meyer (DI)
Judith Miller (ex-NYT)
Zell Miller
Tom Monaghan
Sun Myung Moon
Roy Moore
Dick Morris
Rupert Murdoch
Ralph Nader
John Negroponte
Grover Norquist
Robert Novak
Ted Olson
Elspeth Reeve (TNR)
Bill O'Reilly
Martin Peretz (TNR)
Richard Perle
Ramesh Ponnuru
Ralph Reed
Pat Robertson
Karl Rove
Tim Russert
Rick Santorum
Richard Mellon Scaife
Antonin Scalia
Joe Scarborough
Susan Schmidt (WaPo)
Bill Schneider
Al Sharpton
Ron Silver
John Solomon (WaPo)
Margaret Spellings
Kenneth Starr
Randall Terry
Clarence Thomas
Richard Thompson (TMLC)
Donald Trump
Richard Viguere
Donald Wildmon
Paul Wolfowitz
Bob Woodward (WaPo)
John Yoo
guest-blogging
All the fine sites I've
guest-blogged for:




Be sure to visit them all!!
recent listening
Smash Mouth - Summer Girl

Poulenc - Piano Music

Pop Ambient 2007
influences
John Adams
Laurie Anderson
Aphex Twin
Isaac Asimov
Fred Astaire
J.G. Ballard
The Beatles
Busby Berkeley
John Cage
"Catch-22"
Raymond Chandler
Arthur C. Clarke
Elvis Costello
Richard Dawkins
Daniel C. Dennett
Philip K. Dick
Kevin Drum
Brian Eno
Fela
Firesign Theatre
Eliot Gelwan
William Gibson
Philip Glass
David Gordon
Stephen Jay Gould
Dashiell Hammett
"The Harder They Come"
Robert Heinlein
Joseph Heller
Frank Herbert
Douglas Hofstadter
Bill James
Gene Kelly
Stanley Kubrick
Jefferson Airplane
Ursula K. LeGuin
The Marx Brothers
John McPhee
Harry Partch
Michael C. Penta
Monty Python
Orbital
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
"The Prisoner"
"The Red Shoes"
Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Oliver Sacks
Erik Satie
"Singin' in the Rain"
Stephen Sondheim
The Specials
Morton Subotnick
Talking Heads/David Byrne
Tangerine Dream
Hunter S. Thompson
J.R.R. Tolkien
"2001: A Space Odyssey"
Kurt Vonnegut
Yes
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Comments
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.

Entertaining, interesting, intelligent, informed and informative comments will always be welcome, even when I disagree with them.

I am the sole judge of which of these qualities pertains.


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Corrections
I correct typos and other simple errors of grammar, syntax, style and presentation in my posts after the fact without necessarily posting notification of the change.

Substantive textual changes, especially reversals or major corrections, will be noted in an "Update" or a footnote.

Also, illustrations may be added to entries after their initial publication.
the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
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If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.

If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.

(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)

Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.

original content
© 2003-2008
Ed Fitzgerald

=o=

take all you want
but credit all you take.



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