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FYI, Massachusetts mandates insurance, and there's no true public system, which would drive down costs. And I don't care about guns either way.

Our death rates, as per my post above, are not even close to being due solely to obesity. Greece is fatter than us and has national healthcare twice as good for a third the cost. (Sources cited in my original post.)

We do not have universal healthcare. We have universal disease care, wherein we treat only those critical illnesses that have gotten to the point where patients will die without care (and sometimes not even then) when they could have much more easily been prevented by better care earlier--but the ER doesn't do that. And your so-called "health-care" system is one that bankrupts those who are unfortunate enough to get sick, or get hit by a car driven by someone uninsured (true story; I knew an engineer that had that happen when I volunteered at a drop-in center because after he got hit, he couldn't work, and he had so much to spend on physical therapy for 9+ months that he spent all his savings on copays so he couldn't afford his rent). And over half of bankruptcies in the US, before the housing bubble popped, were due to medical bills, and mostly people who actually had insurance.

And as for ability to choose your insurance, the idea is that there is no insurance--it's transparent. Whatever your doctor says you need, you get. None of this bullshit care denial based on pre-existing conditions or bureaucracy. Everyone gets the same basic standard and nobody's left to die on the street. If you want to purchase additional insurance on top of it, feel free; we will just stop rationing basic, necessary, and preventative care based on ability to pay.

And as to the proposed new system in the US, it's starting to resemble the Belgian system, much more than the Canadian or British systems, which are quite different. Look it up. It's better than ours.

The main reason our system is broken is the profit motive. Normally it drives the free market to great things, but in our case, the less care the individual gets, the more money the insurance company gets, and there's little room to choose another option. Then, one would suggest, we should take down the barriers between states and dismantle the employer-based system--I used to agree with that point, until it came to my attention that this is how credit card companies operate: they move to the state in which the regulations and consumer protections are most lax. Hence it has to be regulated in a federal manner, and at that point, the conservative ideal of a free market has been violated anyway, so we might as well eliminate the 30% administrative costs associated with insurance companies, which, by the way, Medicare outperforms them on.

When was the last time you saw someone indent a paragraph on the internet?

Today, in fact. Of course, indenting is not grammar, but a style convention. The alternate style of placing a blank line between paragraphs has also been around for a long time. I wonder whether the reason for the prevalence of the latter style is that someone once decided to make a tab character equivalent to eight spaces, which is just hideous.

Bottom line is, if a reasonable person can easily read and understand what you've written - mission accomplished. That's success.

Fixed that for you. Far too many people are too lazy to fix their spelling errors and don't realize (or don't care) that this means extra work for their readers. If you[1] write a post with a bunch of misspellings that would have taken you 10 seconds to fix, it will take me 3 extra seconds to decipher your meaning.[2] If more than 3 people read your post, that's a net loss of time. If you write for a large audience and don't proofread, you're wasting a great many man-hours, and folks are entitled to disgruntlement.

[1] "You" here does not refer to RobDude, whose comment was free of misspellings and easily comprehensible. Rather it's the general, hypothetical sort of "you", close kin to "one".

[2] These numbers are made up and not based on careful testing. The real numbers would of course depend on many variables. But my main point[3] is valid.

[3] Those who insist on saving a few seconds of their own time, at the cost of wasting comparable amounts of many others' time, are Not Nice.

Your two problems have intertwined solutions, actually. We'll start to see certain independent blogs gain credibility naturally. The process has already started: consider Nate Silver's blog, or James Kwak and Simon Johnson's, both of which are top-rate sources of analysis that match anything you'll find in the paper. I think the emergence of credibly blogging will occur naturally: the Internet flocks to quality.

That leaves the problem of foreign news, but I don't think it's much a problem. Credible blogs will appear worldwide. Consider how much news we've been able to read from Tehran lately. If you'd like news from Madrid, or Tokyo, or Londom, you can look up a reputable blogger there and read the primary source directly. These native blogs will replace, to large part, foreign correspondents. (This change will be made possibly by the fact that English has become a lingua franca, and it's easier for people from across the world to talk to each other than ever before.)

This model, of course, will lead to rampant astroturfing, disinformation campaigns, partisan hackery, medical quackery (I'm looking at you, Huffington Post), and so on, and I'll miss the Gray Lady, but I don't think it's the end of the world. The discerning reader will still be able to find reliable news, and for the rest, well, they're already reading The Sun or watching Fox News.

And that's where Ahmadinejad got his 60% of the vote. It might be interesting to enable the 'intellectual elite' of Iran living in the big cities to make their displeasure known to the rest of the world. But as long as they have a semblance of a democratic system, their fundies are going to run the place.

Wrong. This is a popular misconception that has been trotted out by the talking heads that the US news networks have gotten to play devil's advocate on this topic. Most of the rural poor in Iran are ethnic minorities, and have a tendency to vote overwhelmingly for the candidate which shares their ethnicity. This is why Iranian elections often result in runoff elections, as the three or four candidates which get all of the various ethnic minority votes push the two frontliners below 50%.

Nate silver discusses it here.

I too keep hearing this "argument". apparently many attribute living outside big cities to being idiots. The rural areas are those most in need, 4 years ago Ahmadinejad made some incredible promises to them, none of which he delivered.

On the other hand they know Mousavi as the guy who saved the nation from starving when oil wells were burning during the Iran-Iraq war. He successfully kept inflation low and economy alive. Ahmadinejad on the other hand promised to make inflation single digit, and instead raised it to ~30% (almost doubled it).

Lastly, since mid-seventies with the rise in oil prices and ensuing mismanagement of wealth, i.e. huge consentration of wealth in cities, a wave of migration to cities started and is still ongoing. A 30 to 70 population ratio of the 70s has come to a near 50-50 ratio. Which means urban+suburban population is now almost equal to rural population. In elections the cities are as important as the rural areas, none of which are particular fan clubs of Ahmadinejad.

Actually, a majority of the population supports decriminalization of marijuana.

I'd believe that most people don't really care if it's decriminalized or not, and I could believe that several polls have concluded the above. I could even believe that some reputable polls concluded that. Of course, decriminalization and legalization are not the same thing.

What I doubt until I see proof otherwise is that most likely voters would support a candidate who was in favor of legalizing pot.

This link backs me up suggesting that while the numbers of people who said they would like to legalize it is going up, it's still not a majority. It mentions that the highest gallup has ever found was 36%. And that's not that they'd vote FOR it, just that they would favor it.

So no, it's really nowhere near it.

And it's not only popular, it's a really good idea in virtually every imaginable way. It's such a smart thing to do, in fact, that there's no way it'll ever get done.

That's an absurd overstatement. Or naive. No public policy of any type can ever truly be a "good idea in virtually every imaginable way."

No it, doesn't confirm the elections were a farce. But there is quite a lot of statistical evidence, and even the government admits to some apparent overvoting. Yes, it could all be coincidence (the statistical evidence allows for a less than 1% chance the chance the election results weren't made up), and it is possible that in between 50 and 170 districts, people voted outside their voting districts and therefore produced greater than 100% turnout, but it's extremely suspect all the same.

The story accompanying the poll and this post are both quite credulous about these results. Nate Silver applies a little Surveying 101 and shows clearly that these claims are dubious at best. Short answer: This poll showed Ahmadinejad with 33.8%, Mousavi with 13.6%, others with 2.6%, and -- this is the kicker -- 7.6% saying "none", 15.1% "refused" and 27.4% "don't know." For an election of this magnitude, that is quite a large number who couldn't choose. The more likely explanation is that some percentage of them were afraid to say whom they supported. Now, does that mean all those other 50.1% were Mousavi supporters? Of course not. But we shouldn't buy claims that this poll demonstrated 2-1 support for Ahmadinejad. (Given that Mousavi supporters clearly had more to fear, at the very least the lead would have been much narrower.) Methodological problems are another matter, but we don't need to get into the weeds in order to see something was wrong.

There's a serious omission in that op-ed that misrepresents that 2:1 ratio.

Namely, that Ahmadinejad only had the vote of 34% of the those polled while Mousavi had 14%. So yes, technically that's 2:1 where the the sum total of both figures is less than 50%. Read the actual report linked to in the article, they highlight this rather important qualifying information by the big red text on page 3.

And if you look at the actual tallies for that question on page 52, question 27, you will see it's 34% for Ahmadinejad, 14% for Mousavi, 27% (!) don't know and 15% (!!) who refused to answer. Both of those are non-trivial percentages that can swing either candidate for a landslide win. This undermines the implication that there is strong support for Ahmadinejad, by a ratio of 2:1 to his closest rival. Seriously, that's an incredulous omission to make, nevermind the fact that the poll itself was conducted a month ago. It is in these past two weeks that voter's opinion would better reflect their voting preferences, you know, after the actual presidential debates.

Fivethirtyeight.com has a good write up of these points, explaining why the opinion expressed in the editorial is not supported by the report it cites. Juan Cole has another good explanation as well.

(The most interesting question on the survey for me BTW, was the question that asked about developing nuclear energy. A full 83% responded with 'strongly favour' while 11% said 'somewhat favour'. That's 94% combined.)

The figures presented from the Washington Post poll does not support the conclusions reached in the poll. For instance:
 

Well, indeed, Ahmadinejad has more than twice as much of the vote as his next-closest rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi. But he also only has 33.8 percent of the total vote. Between them, indeed, Ahmadinejad and Mousavi only have 47.4 percent of the vote. Where does the rest of the vote go?

There were many many non-committal responses. The article goes on to make the point that the great majority of "undecided" respondents to such polls in ideologically run repressive states are a consequence of a repressive regime, and that also casts into doubt the verity of the people responding in favor of those in power.

It's historical. Nate Silver explained it quite well in his blog.

you are insane. and also very incorrect.

let's start with something really easy: job creation by presidential party. the numbers don't lend themselves to a nice pithy "party A good; party B bad" conclusion, but certainly the average shows that, on average, we as a country do better on jobs with Democrats in the head office than Republicans.
okay, maybe you don't like "job creation" as the employment metric (there are decent reasons not to). unemployment is more straight-forward to measure and the data comes in regularly and frequently; what's it tell us? try this analysis. i'll save you some reading, since i imagine that's a problem for you; the conclusion, on page 2, includes the punchline: "Over the past 34 years, Democratic Presidents have overseen periods when the unemployed became employed, and Republican administrations were characterized by an increase in unemployment."
alright, alright, it's not fair to focus only on "employment". there are other ways of generating wealth (although where that gets focused is an interesting question), and the employment numbers don't tell us as much about turnover as we'd like. how about some other metrics? well, this analysis is old enough that we don't get to poke at Bush II much, but the numbers are pretty conclusive over modern US history. "...since 1900, Democratic presidents have produced a 12.3 percent annual total return on the S&P 500, but Republicans only an 8 percent return." c'mon, tell me there's a liberal bias in S&P. you'd have to also lump in the Dow (nearly the same numbers). focusing on congress is also pretty damning; the spread is less dramatic, but still statistically relevant.
perhaps the most important macro metric of all - real GDP - follows the same trend as the stock market, at least since 1930.
how 'bout regionally? well, at least up until the current collapse, New England has been growing substantially faster than the rest of the country (left two columns in this chart; right two aren't really relevant). note the increasing spread between New England and the national average, either by percent or absolute dollars, as it coincides with the blue shift in the region over the same time period.
the Republicans got a lot of traction in the last election cycle out of the "redistribution of wealth" phrase, which they're still pimping. but the reality is that modern Republicans are far more guilty of it. take a look at GDP vs. median wageduring the Bush II years. the nominal increase in the economy after the Bush II crash was all focused on the top slice of the economy - doing very little to stimulate overall economic growth and stability.

you make some pretty weird claims about migration. can you show any evidence for a mass migration from blue to red states? i can't find it. instead, the conventional cause for census shifts are taken to be birth rates differing by states (for a good time, compare to teen birth rates when Republican hacks keep talking about the moral center of Real America) and immigration rates differing by states in roughly the same areas. the net domestic migration numbers, which i think are what you want to look at, don't seem to indicate what you want them to, although i could only find back to 1990. since then, there's been a departure from the northeast, midwest, and pacific coast for the western mo

Already refuted, here:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/statistical-evidence-does-not-prove.html

Unlike with owning cats, cultivating tomatoes without a license, and loaning books to friends, the harm to others is not purely a side effect of such actions being declared illegal and people doing them illegally instead of following the law.

Most of the harm to society comes from the enforcement of the law, and not marijuana use itself. So by the same reasoning, you could outlaw owning cats, and your "logic" would hold equally for that as well. The harm comes not from the criminalization of the act, but from stubborn people who continue to keep cats in direct violation of the ban, right?

What you've basically been arguing, in every comment on this entire story, is that marijuana should remain illegal because it is currently illegal. I cannot, in all your rantings about the sanctity of the will of the majority, find one instance where you cited any actual harm that would result from decriminalization. Oh, wait. It would make the hippies happy, which you seem to consider a harm in its own right.

You also have a second schtick where you try to marginalize the pro-legalization side of the argument as a handful of stoners, which it clearly is not. Recent polls have put the pro-legalization side between 30% and 40% of the population, and 13 states have some form of decriminalization on the books (including California, which by itself has about 1/5th of the population).

I think those numbers would grow if we had a real, substantiative debate about the benefits and harms of legalization vs. the current situation. Because whenever I run across someone so rabidly anti-legalization as you, they have trouble giving good reasons for their position. In your case, you've basically taken "it must be illegal for a reason" and strung it out to the length of dozens of comments.

Here you go.

How is this a troll? Sure a link pointing out one of the reasons it's a red herring would have been nice but I don't see how it's a troll.

This provides a nice apples-to-apples comparison of democratic votes from 2004 to 2008. It's a nice source to quote when people bring up the "Blacks who voted for Obama were racist" meme.

By switching parties he's preventing a small group of very conservative voters from restricting the people of PA from electing somebody they've supported over and over in the past.

Very astute analysis. Here's a TPM article exploring that idea in more detail.

As a politically-conscious geek, I also recommend Nate Silver's analysis of the impact of this move on Senate politics.

Look at it this way, only one president has ever been elected with a margin >18%.

Define "failure". In fact, define "Obama's plan". He's got a dozen of them going right now.

The economic stimulus plan? He's taking criticism from both sides. For every expert you can dredge up to say that it will make things worse, I can find you a critic whose primary problem is that the plan is too small to cover the gap between the economy's current output and its potential output.

The bank bailout plan? Obama has a lot to be criticized for here, but A) it's a really thorny and complex problem, and B) most of the "experts" agree that doing nothing would have been ruinous, and C) a lot of the criticism is demanding emergency nationalization, not half-measures. The government should jump in, declare many of the biggest banks insolvent, wipe out the shareholders, and run the banks until they can find private investors.

By "the majority of indicators," you actually mean "the stock market." The stock market is a lousy proxy for the economic confidence of the country for a variety of reasons. Its view is too narrow, because half the stocks in this country are owned by the wealthiest 1% of Americans, because a rising DJIA only tells you how a relative handful of entrenched companies are doing, and because things that are good for the economy as a whole can be really bad for individual stocks.

For example, the only reason the stocks of some of the banks are still trading above zero: investors believe that Obama will probably keep the government bailout money trickling in, rather than swooping in and wiping out the current investors. I believe that the latter plan would be far better for the economy as a whole, but it would be bad for at least that sector of the stock market.

Also, as a commenter on the previous link pointed out, the stock market dropped 24% after Reagan took office, not because investors were made nervous by Reagan's free market talk, but because there were real problems that needed to be sorted out before growth would resume. Pretending that the stock market is a proxy for America's actual confidence in Obama's policies (forget the 62% approval rating) is a bald-faced lie that you Right-wingers will drop like a plague-ridden dead cat as soon as the market starts recovering.

How many left wingnuts got mod points and confused "flamebait" with "uncomfortable truth" this morning?

Or they didn't confuse "partisan editorial" with "uncomfortable truth".

For every dubious right-wing blog making claims of foul play, I can show you a left-wing blog that has a point-by-point refutation of everything it's saying. Like this one.

In particular, if there were really precincts that had more votes than voters, then why did the Coleman campaign not make that part of the current trial (the main issue of which is improperly rejected absentee ballots, IIRC)?

DURHAM, N.C. -- Voter excitement, always up before a presidential election, is pushing registration through the roof so far this year - with more than 3.5 million people rushing to join in the historic balloting, according to an Associated Press survey that offers the first national snapshot.Figures are up for blacks, women and young people. Rural and city. South and North.

From Fox News.

Nearly half of newly-registered voters in Ohio are aged 18-29.

From fivethirtyeight

And you said:

56.8% of the voting-age population voted in 2008, up from 55.3% in 2004, but below 1960, 64, and 68 at 63.1%, 61.9%, and 60.8% respectively.

So I'm to understand that for the three elections in the 60's, the voter turnout went down by 1.2 and then 1.1 points, and for the 2008 election voter turnout went up by 1.5 points. Notice the difference in turnout for 04-08 is the largest of the numbers you cite.

Voter turnout for the 1960, `64, and `68 election are the highest in recent memory. As long as we're picking elections arbitrarily why didn't you go with 1980, `84, and `88, when the turnout was 52.6%, 53.1%, and 50.1%? I suspect it's because doing so you would have torn your argument apart.

but people with money buy alot of extra crap.

They do buy more extra crap, but the question is "Do they proportionally buy more extra crap compared to lower income people?" If not, then the tax burden shifts to lower income people.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/12/on-importance-of-middle-class-lesson-of.html is slightly related to the topic, and the chart at the top kind of makes my point - people with all that extra income invest in certain areas that wouldn't be taxed if you relied entirely on a sales tax.

The creator of howobamagotelected.com is an idiot. Specifically, John Zeigler is a standard, right-wing blowhard (former) talkshow host. Check out Nate Silver's interview with Zeigler, where they discuss the poll that is the flimsy centerpiece of howobamagotelected.com.

He calls Silver a "pinhead", "a hack", "the enemy", and ended the interview by twice telling Silver to "go fuck [himself]. He refuses to say who financed the poll, and constantly mocks his interviewer for not having the guts to post a transcript of the interview.

The poll itself is manipulative and misleading. It dings Obama supporters for not knowing that their candidate "would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket," which isn't close to what Obama said.*

On the Hannity and Colmes show, he said "There are three questions on this list that a group of monkeys, if they had been guessing, would have done better than the Obama voters did."

Remember that Zeigler -- in between comparing Obama supporters unfavorably to a pack of howler monkeys -- continually asserts that his poll is showing that the media didn't do their jobs, not that Obama voters are stupid. But this obscures a crucial fact: the poll never once asks which sort of media the respondents were consuming.

Also, one of the questions designed to show how well the Evil Liberal Media had done in getting out damaging news about McCain and Palin ("Which candidate said they could see Russia from their house?") seems specifically designed to cast a bad light on the respondents. First, the possible answers were "Sarah Palin" or "John McCain". The actual correct answer (Tina Fey) isn't offered. It's also the only question where Obama and Biden aren't offered as alternatives. Both facts seem designed to drive up the "stupid Obama voters who bought into a fraudulent anti-Palin meme hook line and sinker" percent. In fact, I think that the question shows only that the people taking the survey didn't expect to be subjected to trick questions.

The message of the poll is that "anti-Obama controversies" didn't get as much media attention as "anti-McCain controversies." But unless you actually believe that Barack Obama, Harvard graduate and former editor of the Harvard Law Review, really believed that there were 57 or more states, why should his gaffe have gotten media attention? Gaffes are supposed to be important because they're moments when the candidate lets his or her public persona slip for a few brief seconds and gives insight into the workings of their mind. McCain's inability to say how many houses he had was one such moment. So were Palin's various exaggerations of her foreign policy credentials.

By comparison, Biden's previous "plagiarism controversy" was no such thing. The formulation he was criticized for using was one he'd correctly attributed numerous times in previous stump speeches. The media reported two other examples at the time, but a Biden speechwriter took the blame for one. The point is, since the "plagiarism" was an oversight by a man who is a known to be a one man gaffe factory, not a true attempt to pass off the work of another as his own, nothing really new would be gained by focusing media attention on it.

Notice that none of the howobamagotelected questions ask about the ancient history of McCain or Palin. Nothing was asked of McCain's Keating Five connection, or his "bottom 1%" graduation from the Naval Academy. Nor were voters asked about the controversies that did gain traction, like the Jeremiah Wright association, or his comment about people bitterly clinging to guns and religion. Obama supporters did get asked about Obama's "spread the wealth" comment, and did exceptionally well (81% correct). So of course that result shows up nowhere in Zeigler's summaries of the poll.

This poll is

No, that statistic comes from a completely discredited and blatantly made-up poll made up to create and promote a movie attacking Obama.

Sarah Palin said that she was a foreign policy expert, especially on Russia, because Russia can be seen "from Alaska". In fact, a deserted coastline of Russia's can be barely seen sometimes from a deserted island in Alaska that Palin has never been to, that no Alaska governor has ever been to. Which is why she's mocked for saying that "she can see Russia from her house", because that's only slightly stupider than what she did say. And Palin said it to try to get into the White House for at least 4 years, not just to get to the next commercial break.

But I can see why someone who's so politically stuck in Republican media attacks would call the actual large majority who voted for Obama "pro-Obama voters", as if "Obama" is an issue and not just the president-elect. Because I watched you Republican liars say far stupider things than either that moronic Republican poll or that idiotic Republican VP candidate, for years. And it looks like not even getting power smacked out of your hands has taught you anything.

So keep it up. You "anti-Obama" people are doing a solid job showing yourselves irrelevant to running a country. Making Saturday Night Live funny again, even if only briefly, seems just about the right speed for you and your delicate heroes.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/interview-with-john-ziegler-on-zogby.html

> Why do "net neutrality" advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a "series of tubes," and then trust them to regulate it?

A) Ted "Tubes" Stevens is a convicted felon who won't be in the Senate much longer (even if that count goes the other way, he'll get expelled by the Republicans and replaced by Gov. Sarah Palin).

B) There's no true competition among ISPs. If a backbone provider does this, we're screwed. Period. Full stop. You can't just stop using the backbones. That's why they're backbones. The only way we can force them to listen is with regulation.

So it's not like we want regulation per se, it's more like regulation is the only way to keep them honest. Unless you know of some other way to control the behavior of natural monopolies that doesn't require duplicating billions of dollars of infrastructure when we've already paid for it once?

But you're right. Regulation is a responsibility. We can't just let the rules grow into a huge morass. We have to be careful to come up with clear, simple restrictions like "You cannot throttle traffic based on its destination unless it's part of a DoS attack." Let customers do their own QoS. They know better than the ISP what they want to prioritize, anyhow.

What about the possibility that there were more positive articles about Obama because he was the better candidate, more interesting, and just generally led reporters to be more positive? Maybe instead of "bias" that's just "truth". McCain was boring and unpleasant.

After reading this post from 538 it occurred to me: reporters are actually putting a lot of effort into supporting the facade that the McCain campaign isn't depressing and lifeless. If they let through the truth of it sometimes, that's not bias, that's just doing some decent reporting from time to time.

You leave out the part where Obama performed better among white voters 43% to 41% than John Kerry in 2004.

In any event, the popular vote was 52% to 47% - relatively close, and rather comparable to the 2004 election.

Currently the Washington Post has it at about 53% to 47% (looking at the actual vote totals, they've rounded each down by one percent for some reason). That makes it a 6% margin, which is double the margin of Bush's victory in 2004. That would probably put it in the category of considerably more decisive, but not a blowout. It could be argued, for example, that it's closer to the margin of, say, George H. W. Bush over Dukakis than that of George W. Bush over Kerry. But it's also nothing like a Reagan over Mondale victory.

Obama's much stronger electoral vote showing in 2008 than Bush's in 2004 is a testament to Obama's skills as a campaigner (and perhaps a little luck)

I think it probably says more about the distorting effects of the electoral college and the "first past the pole" system, actually. It'd be interesting to see what statistical distribution of the possible electoral margins would look like for other probable scenarios consistent with the observed popular vote, but I would guess that in most cases a 6% lead would translate into a relatively large electoral lead because of the aforementioned distorting effects. I guess something to look at is the electoral vote prediction histogram on Fivethirtyeight.com, which suggests that the vast majority of scenarios had Obama winning a considerably larger EV total than GWB.

he managed to carry virtually every battleground state by a slim margin, without losing any of his expected-to-win states.

It looks to me (from glancing at Fivethirtyeight.com and Electoral-vote.com that his performance was fairly consistent with the polls in a manner that's not all that shocking.

I don't believe your comment was worth a troll mod

Thanks. It's probably my fault for saying something offensive without providing a reference. Oh well, if they're as smart as they think they are, they will do the research themselves :) I'll just offer this one example like any of a thousand others from http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

Road to 270: West Virginia:

What McCain Has Going For Him:

No state has less educated voters in the aggregate

And so on.

Rather the democratic platform favor's schools FAR more.

Good point. However, it makes me wonder how vehemently I should argue that a platform favouring education and research is more rational. Probably not much. Or is that just an artifact of the particular kind of anti-education agenda favoured by Republicans, which currently involves suppression of science in favour of religious doctrine? Hey, someone who has been ignoring current events will probably think that that's a troll too.

just because I have a PHD doesn't mean I am predisposed to rational behavior.

I dispute that--on average. I'm not saying that it's cause-and-effect or even that the correlation is 100%, but I will go on record as saying that getting a PhD (at least in science!) is very strongly correlated with being able to think clearly, and to discover and question one's own assumptions. On the other hand, smart people are better at justifying stupidity than dumb people.

Furthermore, while my "Where's Republican Waldo?" challenge referenced AAAS and NAS, the numbers I've seen show that one needn't look as far as PhDs and career academics to see the correlation between more education and voting Democrat. Still no reference. Yeesh. So prove me wrong :)

Also the better educated are not always the wealthier. Of the PHDs I know they tend to be poorer as they took the instructor route.

Yes--I don't know how many PhDs with more than $250k/year (ie. those who will be "hurt" by Obama's tax plan (if they consider only take-home money as a measure of wealth)) are voting Democrat. My sample are--unanimously--but it's too small and self-selected (an even dozen) to be useful.

Again, there are plenty of non-academics with good BA/BS/MA/MS/legal/medical/etc degrees making piles of money and voting Democrat. Again, I really do need to do things besides track down references, but I'll watch this thread, and if anyone really cares and can't find supporting research, I know I can locate some.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ has a text messaging service that will likely do this.

Keep one window open to fivethirtyeight.com; one window for The Huffington Post, and one for Swampland.
For TV, I'd go with MSNBC (Chuck Todd ftw), CNN and Fox, just to watch and see if their heads asplode :)

You must not be following the polls. Obama is ahead in every state Kerry won, mostly by margins considered insurmountable. That gets him to 251 practically automatically. Winning Virginia (as he is currently projected to do) would bring him to 264, meaning he'd only need one of OH, FL, CO, NC, IN, or (NV+NM) to win. He can win even if he loses both Ohio and Florida, but he happens to be leading in all of the states I mentioned. (Colorado in particular looks very good for Obama.) He may not sweep them, but he's unlikely to lose them all.

Virginia is also important because it will be our first indicator of the how the night will play out. If Obama wins a state that went to Bush by 9% in 2004, it will signal that the polls were right and Obama is likely to win the election handily. If Obama loses Virginia, then that means the polling has been significantly off and the night will be much tougher for Obama.

I would direct you to take a look at FiveThirtyEight.com, particularly their Tipping Point States sidebar. It reflects the odds that a state will prove to be one of the closest states that would tip the election in the other direction if they were decided differently. You'll notice that Virginia is currently #1.

538 had a nice mention of what seems to be an already high turnout of black voters.

Er... Most of the polls for Indiana show it as a toss up, with the trend leaning slightly towards Obama and the historical expectation leaning slightly toward McCain. The expected margin is very small and this is actually one of the cases where your vote actually could matter.

By writing in some other joker, all you're doing is handing your vote to everyone else around you, which, by your tone, sounds like McCain. So, if you want McCain to win, by all means, vote for Big Bird. If you think Obama is a better choice, then you might consider actually expressing a real opinion instead of trying to make some stupid point by tossing your vote to someone who cannot possibly win.

Most recent polls: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

Popular vote:
Obama: 52.1%
McCain: 46.5%

Of course, that's not what's important. What's important is electoral votes, and the most recent polling shows:
Obama: 348.2
McCain: 189.9
With the most likely winning Obama electoral vote of 375.

According to 538's predictive model, the Nov. 4 projection has Obama at +5.7 on the popular.

So, "about 3 points or so between them" is equal to 5.6 points between them? Can you do maths?

Um, according to fivethirtyeight.com's data, Indiana is a "toss-up", with their calculation of numerous polls putting the probability of Obama at 48% and McCain at 52%. Your vote certainly does count, and if you think otherwise, then McCain will run away with your state for certain.

hes only doing this because Obama is allreay going to win.

According to this site (not a bs-site) it is currently as 96% change for Obama

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

> I mean, really, do you think for a second that Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are going to appoint someone like Lessig?

Bush, Cheney & Rove vanish next January. Even if they have time to appoint someone, that person would get replaced by the next administration. There's a virtual guarantee that the next President will be Obama and he's thinking about how to put together his cabinet right now.

So this would be a good time to suggest reasonable people to head this thing. It's going to pump out all sorts of piracy studies. The industry wants it to create more BS economic damage numbers that it can spin. That's why it's VERY important that it have an honest and competent leader, whoever it might be.

For those people that don't want to install mathematica you could go to fivethirtyeight.com and get updated polls. I got this from the typewriter xkcd.

I'm not saying it was brilliant. I'm saying it was a trap, and the Democrats walked into it. If they hadn't, McCain wouldn't have gained such a substantial bump from the pick. Nevertheless, if you look at the distribution of the massive number of polls released, it still shows McCain ahead in electoral votes. Now, the big polls usually have about a week lag behind events, give or take. Some folks are suggesting that the more recent polls show Obama with a lead because of the financial meltdown from the last few days. But in that case, it wouldn't be Palin but the economy that's the problem for McCain's numbers.

FiveThirtyEight: look at the "Supertracker" by scrolling down, it's on the right side.

Electoral-vote.com: interpret the polling lines with a one week lag after major events. You can see the Obama bump post-DNC, and then the collapse post-RNC.

I'm not, because Obama ain't magic. He's the best shot we have at a sane nation on 20 January, but he still has to play ball right now (and he still will when he's President, just to a lesser degree). It wasn't Republican pressure or even the election that meant he had to vote for this bill - it was Nancy Pelosi. Nate Silver at 538 gives a better analysis than I can:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/06/large-majority-of-swing-district.html

If you don't want to click, here's the summary: Pelosi threw her weight behind this compromised bill, and she's been Obama's primary ally in the Democratic party. Snubbing her on this vote would have meant a much tougher fight to get meaningful health care reform passed. You might even call this his first political move in a presidential role.

About the only thing I agree with McCain on is that we need one heck of a lot more nuclear power plants. But our global diplomatic stance, Iraq (drawing down), Afghanistan (stepping it up), health care, taxes, net neutrality, education, Supreme Court nominations, transparency and information availability from government - all of these are why I'm voting for Obama. His FISA vote, while it's unfortunate that he had to do so, won't change my vote in November.

Using the Intrade data is interesting, so it's too bad that the author then just throws out the probabilities. He just counts the higher-probability outcome in each state as if it's certain to happen.

The result is that the map is telling us the maximum-likelihood outcome in terms of which states go to who. This one outcome happens to be one that Obama wins. But it doesn't tell us the probability of Obama winning over all outcomes.

What I'd like to see is this data fed into a model that simulates many possible elections, like the one at fivethirtyeight.com.

I was looking at electoral-vote the other day and was thinking about some of the problems with the model when I realized, "Gee, I could do a better job." The votemaster (Tanenbaum) may be a fine computer scientist, but his statistical modeling is really very simplistic. It gives you only a very rough idea of the probability of any particular election scenario, even though he collects enough polling data to produce a decent likelihood distribution.

So I was eager to start on this new hobby... but then I googled a bit and saw that someone has already implemented most of my ideas at fivethirtyeight.com. Drat. Anyway, that site is actually pretty good.

The important statistic there is the "win percentage". It is a likelihood estimate of a candidate's victory. So if we go only by polling data, then we'd predict Obama to win 52.6% of the time. This is so close to 50% because there are a lot of states which, based on polls, could break either way, even if they are not split 50/50. For example, recent polls give Obama a pretty consistent lead over McCain in Pennsylvania of about 5 to 8 points, but the error in polling is uncertain enough that the odds for Obama's victory in PA are still only about 2:1. If either candidate were to be assured of victory in the general election, we'd need to see quite a lot of movement in the polls.

I can still think of some improvements I'd make to fivethirtyeight.com if it were my work. Mostly I'd want to estimate the model-dependent systematic error by running the election simulation with a few different algorithms, and by running it several times discarding a single polling group each other. (i.e., run the analysis without Rasmussen, run it without SurveyUSA, etc.)

I would agree with you if there had been large swings between Clinton and Obama over the last few months, but that hasn't been the case. Instead there has been a clear trend favouring Clinton's performance in the general. See 538's win percentage tracker for instance (direct link to the file,if you prefer). In my view, if you refuse to count the conclusions of 4 months worth of polling, then there is no statistical argument that you will accept. All statistical arguments for the 2008 election can only contain information gathered up until the end of May 2008. If you argue that they are too imprecise to come to a conclusion, then you can't argue anything at this point.

I don't believe that the sky is falling, by the way. The Democrats clearly have a shot at the white house with Obama as the nominee, it will just be a closer race than it would have been if they had chosen Clinton. Too close, in my view, for a year where Democrats were supposed to sweep the elections and where the Republicans were thought to be in disarray.

The argument that Clintonites will fall in line as soon as she drops out of the primary race is also incorrect. It will require some time for the party to heal. Obama has taken the right first steps, although it seems many of his supporters are still stuck in primary campaign mode, constantly bashing Clinton as if Obama was still fighting for the nomination. They will have to stop too for the party to truly unify. But that really won't affect the outcome in most states, with the possible exception of Michigan. Even if it stopped tomorrow, I'm worried that the bitterness will carry on to November.

And, lastly, since I imagine you're thinking it, no, I am not a Clinton supporter. I feel that the DLC has pushed Democratic policy far passed the middle and made them De facto Conservatives. But Clinton's and Obama's policies are almost identical (besides tiny differences in their health care plan and her last minute, desperation tactic support for the gas tax holiday), so I don't see any reason to support him either.