digamma.net - notes

A question for Michael Moore fans: is there anything in Fahrenheit 9/11 anywhere near as good as this Daily Show segment, in which Dick Cheney is caught lying about the Atta-in-Prague intelligence?

It’s time to vote in the MaxSpeak Blogroll Contest! May I humbly suggest you vote for my entry?

Andrew Sullivan calls this interview “some tough questions to which our very own Leni Riefenstahl has no good answers.” I’m no fan of Michael Moore, but fair is fair: I read the interview, and I thought he answered every one of Tapper’s questions satisfactorily.

Electoral-vote.com is a great resource for tracking the 51 separate Presidential elections we’re going to hold this November, and what their sum might be. Right now the Votemaster splits the states into Safe Kerry, Weak Kerry, Barely Kerry, and three equivalent categories for Bush states. And he predicts 300 electoral votes for Kerry to 228 for Bush.

But there’s a problem here - in calculating that final total, he counts the Barely Kerry states the same as the Safe Kerry states. Certainly that’s how things work in November - in most states (Maine is one exception, and I think there are others), you get all the electors regardless of your margin of victory. But at the same time, Kerry’s current 22% lead in Rhode Island has more predictive value than does his 2% lead in Iowa. And despite the Votemaster’s Kerry prediction, Bush has more “safe” states than Kerry.

So if we weight the states where a candidate has a large lead such that they “count” more than the battleground states, how does the prediction change?

I downloaded the spreadsheet from the site and added a field for each candidate-state pair called Expected Electoral Vote, defined as the state’s number of electors multiplied by the candidate’s current polling percentage. If we ran that state’s election an infinite number of times, and the probability that a given candidate would win equalled his polling position on June 24, 2004, this new number would represent the average number of electors he would obtain from that state. For example, Kerry is currently polling at 35% in Alabama, which has 9 electors - his Expected Electoral Vote (henceforth EEV) total for Alabama is 35% of 9 = 3.15. Bush, at 54% in Alabama right now, can expect 4.86 electoral votes.

Totalling up EEV for every candidate in every state, it’s another squeaker. Kerry wins by three quarters of an elector, 245.2 to 244.45. Nader, the only independent running at the moment, grabs 13.58 electors. I hope the Supreme Court aren’t planning to go on vacation this fall.

Full EEV totals, based on electoral-vote.com’s June 24th data, are below.
(more…)

Representative Durbin perfectly summed up the Federal Marriage Amendment today:

We have a preemptive foreign policy; I don’t think we oughta have a preemptive Constitution, and that’s what you’re arguing for here, we oughta put a provision in the Constitution to preempt the possibility that the Defense of Marriage Act will be found unconstitutional and force on some other state the definition of marriage. And that, I think, is entirely premature, and totally political.

Amen. I swear I can remember a time when conservatives understood the difference between a federal law and a constitutional amendment - much better than the left.

The story also notes that the Republicans hope to force a vote on the Amendment just before the Democratic convention. Bring it on. Not only will the FMA fail, but Kerry and Friends will have non-stop media coverage with which to explain why it deserved to fail.

Kevin Drum wrote last night:

I think the economy is basically a wash this year: good enough to keep Bush in the running but bad enough to give Kerry a chance. Neither man has an overwhelming advantage….. Rather, the race this year will be won or lost on terrorism and national security….

But the terrorism issue isn’t working for Bush’s crowd anymore. So now they’re trying to make the election about gay marriage, in particular a ridiculous Constitutional amendment that only true partisans will support.

And when we look back a year from now, the Federal Marriage Amendment will be what we all agree sank George W. Bush.

I spent the latter half of this week at the Information Assurance Workshop in West Point. A more beautiful campus is seriously hard to imagine.

(I didn’t take that. I stole it from this page, which is probably considered treason. Oh well.)

So at any rate, here are two pet peeves I discovered during panel discussions at the conference.

“Panacea". If you’re using that word in an argument, 9 times out of 10 you’re arguing with a straw man. “Open-source software is not a security panacea.” “Drug testing will not solve all of baseball’s problems.” These statements are true. The problem with them is that NOBODY DISAGREES WITH THEM.

Solution X is almost never a panacea for problem Y. Nonetheless, solution X can often go a long way towards alleviating problem Y. If you don’t approve of solution X, say so - don’t paint all proponents of solution X as making extravagant claims, even if a portion of them do it.

Everybody and his or her respective mother is blogging about this New York Times Magazine article about how teenage boys are supposedly enjoying oral sex whenever they want it from their “friends with benefits". See Belle Waring, Matthew Yglesias, and Amy Phillips for the best responses.

For my part, I was at a comic book store in my hometown last weekend watching some kids play Magic the Gathering, and I think it’s safe to say that kids like me are still getting exactly as much action today as kids like me got in my day. None.

If more kids had the low self-esteem, social ineptitude, and poor personal hygiene I had as a teenager, pregnancy and STD’s would be a lot less of an issue. Fund that, President Bush.