Published on Sep 15, 2012 by VitacoreVision
Rand Paul suggests if the GOP wants to win over places like California, they will need to support more freedom in social issues and embrace a more Libertarian stance.
H/T to Peter Jaworski (retweeting original Moose of Reason tweet) for the link.
L. Neil Smith explains one of the most significant reasons that the most recent US election didn’t seem to offer much in the way of choice between the two major party candidates:
No matter how hard Productive Class folks may work at trying to put good people into office, people who respect the Bill of Rights, as well as our dignity as individuals, every single time, we end up with a non-choice between two sets of rapacious gangsters, government parasites and their corporate lookalikes who, differing only in the excuses they use to justify it, see us only as cattle, to be herded, branded, milked, and slaughtered. On the rare occasion that someone decent pokes his head up — Barry Goldwater, Ron Paul — it’s cut off by the socialist mass media, pack animals who give prostitution a bad name.
Beyond the palest shadow of a doubt, the game is rigged, with people who actually work for a living assigned the role of perpetual losers, expected to bow down to Authority no matter how ludicrous its demands, required to observe the letter and the spirit of the law no matter how often, or how outrageously it’s flouted by the insatiably power-hungry. Those who object — especially if they get together to air their grievances — are labeled rednecks, racists, or terrorists by the socialist mass media, depending on what’s in fashion at the time. The truth has no place in this process, only the virtual reality created by the socialist mass media at the behest of their thuggish clientele.
To make things even worse, members of the Productive Class find themselves in the role of shuttlecock in a game of political badminton that has been going on for two centuries. Fed up with the failures and excesses of, say, the Republicans, voters will replace them with Democrats, only to be reminded, in short order, that Democrats suffer failures and commit excesses of their own. Four years after that, experiencing political amnesia again, they put Republicans back in power, when what they ought to do is dump “both” major parties (which are really only one entity, the party of endless lies and coercion) altogether.
https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/265935840763604993
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At Techdirt, Mike Masnick reports on the latest attempt to get out the vote:
It’s election day. While your actual ballot is (supposed to be) secret, a lot of people don’t know that whether or not you voted at all is public information. A few weeks back, On the Media covered some ways that campaigns try to get out the vote and looked at some research suggesting that letters to people with a “voter report card” showing when they’ve voted in the past was a somewhat effective way of shaming people into voting. An even more extreme example was given as well: a letter that specifically shows how often your neighbors have voted. In the piece, OTM producer Chris Neary noted that while such things were effective in the lab, people shouldn’t be expecting such letters for real, because, while they may be effective in getting out the vote, they also freak people out on privacy grounds, and no campaign wants to risk freaking people out:
And, by the way Brooke, you’ll never get that last letter. Campaigns hate to send out anything that prompts virulent hate mail in return, and one of those researchers got some of that mail.
Except… Neary has now posted an apology blog post after some OTM listeners reached out to share exactly the kinds of mailers discussed. While campaigns might shy away from such tactics, apparently third party organizations read the exact same research and took it to heart — as they’re a lot less worried about hate mail
All of the various political parties, pressure groups, “public interest” organizations and the rest are desperate to ramp up voter participation in the election. It’s frequenly pointed out that voters are apathetic and the reduced percentage of voters over the last thirty-plus years is trotted out as evidence of that. However, as Katherine Mangu-Ward points out in this month’s issue of Reason, for the vast majority of Americans Your Vote Doesn’t Count:
Let’s start with the basics: Your vote will almost certainly not determine the outcome of any public election. I’m not talking about conspiracy theories regarding rigged elections or malfunctioning voting machines — although both of those things have happened and will happen again. I’m not talking about swing states or Supreme Court power grabs or the weirdness of the Electoral College. I’m talking about pure, raw math.
In all of American history, a single vote has never determined the outcome of a presidential election. And there are precious few examples of any other elections decided by a single vote. A 2001 National Bureau of Economic Research paper by economists Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter looked at 56,613 contested congressional and state legislative races dating back to 1898. Of the 40,000 state legislative elections they examined, encompassing about 1 billion votes cast, only seven were decided by a single vote (two were tied). A 1910 Buffalo contest was the lone single-vote victory in a century’s worth of congressional races. In four of the 10 ultra-close campaigns flagged in the paper, further research by the authors turned up evidence that subsequent recounts unearthed margins larger than the official record initially suggested.
The numbers just get more ridiculous from there. In a 2012 Economic Inquiry article, Columbia University political scientist Andrew Gelman, statistician Nate Silver, and University of California, Berkeley, economist Aaron Edlin use poll results from the 2008 election cycle to calculate that the chance of a randomly selected vote determining the outcome of a presidential election is about one in 60 million. In a couple of key states, the chance that a random vote will be decisive creeps closer to one in 10 million, which drags voters into the dubious company of people gunning for the Mega-Lotto jackpot. The authors optimistically suggest that even with those terrible odds, you may still choose to vote because “the payoff is the chance to change national policy and improve (one hopes) the lives of hundreds of millions, compared to the alternative if the other candidate were to win.” But how big does that payoff have to be to make voting worthwhile?
David Gewirtz has a thought about the awesome achievement of the American Presidency:
America has almost 3 million active and reserve military personnel. We spend almost $550 billion dollars each year on defense. According to the Federation of American Scientists, America has just about 5,000 nuclear warheads.
The United States Navy has about 300 ships, almost 4,000 aircraft, 71 submarines, and 11 aircraft carriers — each with more firepower than most nations. The United States has close to 9,000 battle-ready tanks. The United States Air Force has nearly 6,000 aircraft, 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles, and 32 satellites orbiting Earth under its direct control.
In other words, the United States has the most powerful military in the history of mankind.
And yet, every four to eight years, ultimate control of that incredible firepower changes hands — without a single shot being fired.
Iowahawk has been posting a daily Twitter update reminding people that the reliability of political polls is much lower than ever before:
Your daily reminder: all political polls are still garbage. #9percentresponserate
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) October 29, 2012
At Macleans, Colby Cosh digs a bit deeper to find out how polling organizations are responding to their approaching-flatline response rate:
The boffins are becoming increasingly reliant on “non-probability samples” like internet panel groups, which give only narrow pictures of biased subsets of the overall population. The good news is that they can take many such pictures and use modern computational techniques to combine them and make pretty decent population inferences. “Obama is at 90 per cent with black voters in Shelbyville; 54 per cent among auto workers; 48 per cent among California epileptics; 62 per cent with people whose surnames start with the letter Z…” Pile up enough subsets of this sort, combined with knowledge of their relative sizes and other characteristics, and you can build models which let you guess at the characteristics of the entire electorate (or, if you’re doing market research, the consumerate).
As a matter of truth in advertising, however, pollsters have concluded that they shouldn’t report the uncertainty of these guesses by using the traditional term “margin of error.” There is an extra layer of inference involved in the new techniques: they offer what one might call a “margin of error, given that the modelling assumptions are correct.” And there’s a philosophical problem, too. The new techniques are founded on what is called a “Bayesian” basis, meaning that sample data must be combined explicitly with a prior state of knowledge to derive both estimates of particular quantities and the uncertainty surrounding them.
[. . .]
Pollsters are trying very hard to appear as transparent and up-front about their methods as they were in the landline era. When it comes to communicating with journalists, who are by and large a gang of rampaging innumerates, I don’t really see much hope for this; polling firms may not want their methods to be some sort of mysterious “black box,” but the nuances of Bayesian multilevel modelling, even to fairly intense stat hobbyists, might as well be buried in about a mile of cognitive concrete. Our best hope is likely to be the advent of meta-analysts like (he said through tightly gritted teeth) Nate Silver, who are watching and evaluating polling agencies according to their past performance. That is, pretty much exactly as if they were “black boxes.” In the meantime, you will want to be on the lookout for that phrase “credibility interval.” As the American Association for Public Opinion Research says, it is, in effect, a “[news] consumer beware” reminder.
Paul “Inkless” Wells points out that the hyperventilation over the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in the Etobicoke Centre election case is just a tad overblown:
There was some chatter on Twitter this morning, after the Supreme Court ruled to uphold the election results in Etobicoke Centre, to the effect that Stephen Harper has finally succeeded in stacking the top court with corrupt thugs and we are now fully entered into a post-democratic era here in KanuckiHarperStan. My hunch is that this overstates things.
First, this was actually the Harper government’s first good day at the Court in a while. The Supremes have more often been in the habit of handing Harper trouble, as with the Insite supervised-injection site case and Jim Flaherty’s dead-parrot project for a national securities regulator. In those highest of high-profile cases, Harper appointees concurred with their colleagues in unanimous judgments.
Today there was division, and it didn’t follow partisan lines neatly. (I’ll cut to the chase: I think it’s simplistic to presume a justice appointed by a given PM will consistently rule in ways that please that PM. This has simply never been the case in Canada, to the dismay of a succession of prime ministers.)
The announcement back in June must have appeared too good to be true: a new bridge between Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario to be completely funded by Canada. Michigan voters are being urged to refuse the deal:
Canada, understand, has agreed to pay for the bridge in full, including liabilities — and potential cost overruns — under an agreement that was about a decade-in-the-making and officially announced to much fanfare, at least on the Canadian side of the border, by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder in Windsor/Detroit in mid-June.
For Michigan, it is a slam-dunk arrangement. As Mr. Norton told one audience: ‘‘If this proves to be a dumb financial decision, it’s on us, not on you.’’
It’s a free bridge, a vital new piece of publicly owned infrastructure — for both countries — and yet one that is in grave danger of being demolished before construction even begins when Michigan voters head to the polls for a ballot initiative attached to the Nov. 6 elections.
[. . .]
Manuel (Matty) Moroun, an 85-year-old self-made billionaire who owns the 83-year-old Ambassador Bridge, is Cynic-in-Chief. The Ambassador is currently the only transport truck-bearing bridge in town. Twenty-five percent of Canadian-American trade, representing about $120-billion, flows across it each year.
It is a perfect monopoly for the Moroun family, a golden goose that just keeps on laying eggs, putting upwards of $80-million a year in tolls, duty free gas and shopping sales in their pockets. Allowing a Canadian-financed competitor into the ring without a fight isn’t an option.
The UN has become so concerned about claims that voting in the United States is corrupt that it will deploy international observers during the US elections:
United Nations-affiliated election monitors from Europe and central Asia will be at polling places around the U.S. looking for voter suppression activities by conservative groups, a concern raised by civil rights groups during a meeting this week. The intervention has drawn criticism from a prominent conservative-leaning group combating election fraud.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a United Nations partner on democratization and human rights projects, will deploy 44 observers around the country on Election Day to monitor an array of activities, including potential disputes at polling places.
Liberal-leaning civil rights groups met with representatives from the OSCE this week to raise their fears about what they say are systematic efforts to suppress minority voters likely to vote for President Obama.
Update, 23 October: Among the observers will be Azerbaijani and Kazakhstani representatives, and some of the places being monitored include places like Concord, NH and Tallahassee, FL:
For example, Aida Alzhanova of Kazakhstan will be monitoring in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Phoenix, Arizona. Elchin Musayvev from Azerbaijan will be monitoring in Concord, New Hampshire.
[. . .]
Other U.N. targets include Richmond (VA), Harrisburg (PA), Raleigh (NC), Austin (TX), Des Moines (Iowa), St. Paul, (Minn.), Topeka (KS), and Tallahassee (FL).
Blazing Cat Fur celebrates the departure of Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty, but warns that there’s little joy for the Tories (or ordinary Ontarians for that matter) even with McGuinty off the stage:
So what’s next for Ontario? Tim Hudak will not be the one to lead Ontario out of the wilderness and I don’t blame Hudak. I doubt any conservative will be elected premier for a very long time in Ontario.
McGuinty turned Ontario into a have not province and in the process sold Ontario to the public service unions. No conservative candidate, no matter how blue the 905 etc, can realistically expect to win against Fortress Entitlement, aka Toronto. If you want to see the future of Ontario then look to Detroit. Successive Democratic party regimes looted the tax payers to pay for the promises made to their “friends”. The resulting sense of entitlement became institutionalized, a part of the political DNA. Ontario is no different, look at how Toronto is run, the entitlement spiral is well on its way there. The public service unions will continue to demand more and our politicians will continue to grant them more and there’s nothing you or I can do about it except move. It’s a simple numbers game and there’s more of them than there are of us.
One can only hope that he’s being too pessimistic. But the politician most likely to gain from McGuinty’s resignation isn’t even a member of the Liberal party: it’s NDP leader Andrea Horwath, who may be able to ride the tail end of the federal NDP surge into Queen’s Park as our second NDP premier.
He’s showing his bipartisan disdain for both of the leading candidates in the election:
We’re in debate season. You’re not on the stage, but what might we hear from you if you were?
Well, I would not bomb Iran. I would get out of Afghanistan tomorrow, bring the troops home. I believe that marriage equality is a constitutionally guaranteed right. I would end the drug wars. I would advocate legalizing marijuana now. I would have never signed the Patriot Act. I would have never signed the National Defense Authorization Act allowing for arrests and detainment of you and me as U.S. citizens without being charged. I believe we need to balance the federal budget now and that means a $1.4 trillion reduction in federal spending now. When it comes to jobs, I’m advocating eliminating income tax, corporate tax, abolishing the IRS, and replacing all of that with one federal consumption tax. In this case, I am embracing the FairTax. I think that that’s really the answer when it comes to American jobs. In a zero corporate tax rate environment, if the private sector doesn’t create tens of millions of jobs, then I don’t know what it takes to create tens of millions of jobs.
So I think big differences between me and these two guys [Obama and Romney]: They’re on stage debating who’s going to spend more money on Medicare when we have to slash Medicare spending or we’re going to find ourselves with no health care at all for those over 65. And Medicare, very quickly, is a benefit that we put $30,000 in and get $100,000 out. It’s not sustainable and it has to be addressed. None of this is sustainable. None of it. I think we all recognize that we’re in deep trouble and we’re going to need to make some mutual sacrifices on all of our parts. But I just saw the whole debate thing as head in the sand, Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy — they’re all coming, don’t worry.
I didn’t watch either the Presidential or Vice-Presidential debates, but Megan McArdle seems to have the most even-handed analysis of the Veep sock-fest:
Biden launched into the eye rolling and the smirking, the head shaking and the laughing, and of course, the constant interrupting, nearly as soon as Ryan started talking. I assume that means it was part of their debate coaching. I mean, I don’t think that he intended to come off as an obnoxious eighth grader heckling a classmate, or to actually shout himself hoarse with his constant interruptions. I’d guess they told him to come across as genially disappointed, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger, and he kind of went off the rails.
Both candidates looked far overcoached for this debate; you could hear the hesitations as they desperately tried to overstuff their responses with canned lines. And that overcoaching showed up in their demeanor. Paul Ryan was speaking so slowly that it sometimes sounded as if he was reading off a teleprompter set at half speed; this made him seem uncertain of his memorized answers, not deliberate. And Biden — well, we seemed to be watching him going through a second puberty, complete with voice changes.
Yet I suspect that MSNBC was right: this was what the Democratic base wanted to see. Yes, they also wanted to hear him defend their issues. But they already agree with him on the issues. Their biggest desire was just for someone to express their disdain for the Republican Party, and particularly its rising young star — to display their collective contempt in a public venue. I’m not sure exactly why this is so important, but I seem to recall that the same dynamic from Republicans in 2004. There’s a lesson there about where American politics is headed, and it’s a pretty grim one.
[. . .]
But unfortunately I thought Biden threw that away that lead with his behavior. It’s hard to get enthusiastic about a candidate who apparently might go full frontal jackass at any moment. I’ve seen a bunch of progressives dismiss this as conservative carping, but watching CNN’s ticker of undecided voter sentiment, it seemed to me that every time Joe Biden started talking over Paul Ryan, Ryan’s ratings went up. And it was the first thing that the CNN hosts, most of whom I guarantee are not Romney/Ryan voters, commented on. The panels of undecided voters also brought it up — and none of them said, “It made Vice President Biden seem really authoritative and in control”. Some of the commentary this morning seemed so suggest that if progressives just insist sufficiently loudly that it was awesome, everyone else will have to agree. I think this rather overestimates both the ability to “work the refs” in the media, and also, the power of doing so.
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