I didn't watch much of the Republic convention, but I saw a snippet with Wolf Blitzer talking to Rand Paul, saying "Really, you think that the country will fall apart if Obama wins. That's a bit extreme."

During the next segment, the correspondent challenged the person interviewing, but I don't remember what he said.

Although I think the country will fall apart if Romney wins.

2: In 4 years. We survived Bush--with terrible damage--but we survived.

That terrible damage = the country falling apart. I mean, there was a staggering amount of damage done.

Even Farrx noticed.

I am completely shocked by 5, actually.

If they've lost Fox, Obama might pull it off after all (I don't mean get re-elected, he probably will anyway, but get re-elected with a Senate that will confirm his appointments and a house that, if not Democratic, at least spends some time in the real world.)

I do like "factual shortcut" as a euphemism. You can definitely say one thing about this election: by the end of it, the American media will have enriched the English language in their attempts not to call lies lies.

I predict that if Romney is re-elected, there will be another recession. This will make the Great Recession a double-dip recession, where the second dip is caused by people in Washington feeling the need to balance the budget, just like the Great Depression.

But still no one uses the word lie or liar. Questionable facts, factual shortcuts, keeping the fact checkers busy (Blitzer is such a fucking tool.)

5: Sally Kohn is one of Fox's designated liberals -- "Fox News asked me to write the liberal response to Paul Ryan's GOP convention speech last night."
http://sallykohn.com/category/opeds/

Rome didn't fall in a day, or something.

11: Huh, I didn't know such unicorns existed.

5/6: don't be surprised; Sally Kohn is their token Democrat. (They're "fair and balanced", remember?) She's always critical of Republicans.

When Sean Hannity calls Ryan a liar, I'll be surprised.

Well, the Yahoo headline still surprises me.

In fact, government documents on the bailout obtained by Rolling Stone show that the legend crafted by Romney is basically a lie. The federal records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Romney's initial rescue attempt at Bain & Company was actually a disaster - leaving the firm so financially strapped that it had "no value as a going concern." Even worse, the federal bailout ultimately engineered by Romney screwed the FDIC - the bank insurance system backed by taxpayers - out of at least $10 million. And in an added insult, Romney rewarded top executives at Bain with hefty bonuses at the very moment that he was demanding his handout from the feds.

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Because I haven't poked Halford with a stick in awhile: an interesting article on how copyright law forces streaming TV services to be inefficient.

This is the story of [the] Cablevision [decision], the companies that followed in its wake, and how we got to the strange place where wasting resources on thousands of tiny antennas made you legal--but where using one antenna broke the law.

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While I'm being OT: this is as bad as it sounds, right? We should all disable Java on our browsers? Sifu, others?
|>

You can't disable Sifu on your browser. He'll just come back.

18: Buck says it's exactly that bad, and I have disabled Java.

OS X ships with a shitty older version of Java which may not be vulnerable (as far as people know it isn't vulnerable, but it might be possible to modify the thing slightly) but otherwise, sure, it's as bad as it sounds.

To disable Sifu in your browser you'll need to install TOR or something similar, purchase some bitcoin, negotiate forums to find a reputable seller and then buy me a ton of weed.

A commenter on ars technica says Oracle are/were planning to patch this thing in October. That's so fucking negligent it ought to be tortious. I hope Microsoft and Google join up to sue the life out of them.

Any news if they're planning to bring this forward now they've been caught with their pants down?

I do like "factual shortcut" as a euphemism.

Hmm. Maybe I'm over-thinking it, but to me it parses as "still essentially factual, but sacrificing of nuance on the altar of brevity." As if it were just a quicker but less precise way of expressing an underlying truth.

The Yahoo! - you have to have the '!'! - headline I see now is: "'He's a straight shooter': Voters react to Ryan's speech".

You know, I don't know why it didn't occur to me, but I bet Yahoo! has some cookie tagging me to Liberal Bias News Choices, Please.

Is it even possible to disable Java on Chrome (PC version)?

26: it prompts you each time it is requested by default.

See top answer here.

Thanks. I just found it. Chrome keeps changing their settings menus - that SuperUser answer doesn't apply anymore.

I'm actually trying to learn some Java for a class on algorithms, but I assume that's not going to make me vulnerable since I'm running the environment locally.

Oh wait, that answer does apply. Pay no attention to my comments.

OS X ships with a shitty older version of Java which may not be vulnerable

I knew I was using the secure operating system choice.

I think the press is called him out a bit because they realize that the Rs are calling them out -- pushing a new line in the lying game. They think they can just say whatever, with just the smallest fig leaf of correspondence with reality as cover, and just make it stick using that flood of Citizens United money. I mean, plenty of lying in politics for some time, but Ryan's speech was more brazen than most any I remember.

This renders (even more) obsolete any press role as an impartial medium. It's been coming for some time but we'll see it supercharged by the corporate money in this year's race.

Hey ladies, he's single and looking to mingle!

I think the press is called him out a bit because they realize that the Rs are calling them out -- pushing a new line in the lying game. They think they can just say whatever, with just the smallest fig leaf of correspondence with reality as cover, and just make it stick using that flood of Citizens United money. I mean, plenty of lying in politics for some time, but Ryan's speech was more brazen than most any I remember.

I'm reminded of Sarah Palin and the "Bridge to nowhere" standoff last election.

It seemed to me that the R's thinking there was if they could establish, right out of the gate, that she could spout any blatant lie and not get called on it, then she'd be home free for the rest of the campaign. That's why she stuck so tenaciously to the "I can keep repeating this lie and you can't stop me nya nya" strategy for so long.

I was honestly surprised that the press didn't back down then.

||

I am so angry and depressed by the recent news from South Africa! Of course, as an anarchist, I have been fairly cynical about the ability of erstwhile revolutionaries in the ANC and other SA political parties to escape the tendency for bureaucratization and oppression that usually follows successful revolutions. And yet, this outrageous massacre of striking miners, which has now been compounded by murder charges leveled against the survivors, is so cynical and reprehensible that even I am shocked. Of course, this is not, by any means, the first thing that has gone horribly wrong in post-Apartheid South Africa. But this particular miscarriage of justice seems so horrific and brutal (as evinced by the fact that even the running-dog lackeys in corporate media in the West are willing to portray it as an injustice to the workers) that I can't help but feel especially enraged. THIS is why I don't trust any statist politician, no matter how revolutionary their position may seem. They always, always, always stab you in the back once they get power.

Sigh.

||>

18 et seq: Thanks.

I'm a bit depressed to realize that approximately 15% of my co-workers do not know what browser they are using, or indeed what a "browser" is. These are smart people! We work on projects all the time!

32 is amazing.

It's a big strange world out there.

It must be a fake, because wouldn't a real Brony spell Pinkie Pie's name right?

Def. fake. Good, though.

It's obviously real because I have a review copy of Serfdom in Equestria right here on my computer.

Personally, I'm more worried about what appear to be slave ponies. And the fucked-up racist zebra stuff.

Java was built by a company called Sun Microsystems, which did a pretty decent job of running the show for a long time. Then, a couple years ago, Sun got bought by Oracle, and Oracle has been fucking it up ever since.

I guess I'll go uninstall Java when I get home. I might forget about this kind of thing entirely, except that I seem to remember some kind of patch or update recently. Hope I'm just being paranoid.

35: I can totally understand not knowing what version number of a browser you're using - I don't myself - but not knowing what program you're using sounds very dumb, yeah. (A third possibility comes to mind: maybe they don't know that the word "browser" means "program you use to view Web pages with" As for how bad that is, it seems somewhere in between the first two.)

When you think about it, though, it's amazing how many people are wrong about all kinds of things. I mean, given two options plus "not sure", when was the last time you saw fewer than 20 percent of any group agree with something? A political campaign, a poll question with a binary choice, a question about history, etc. Think about this for a second: black Republicans exist.

5: Wow, somebody's off reservation. I thought Faux's designated liberals were supposed to be tame and timid.

While 32 is likely a hoax, I have no doubt that, somewhere, a dude like that exists.

43: maybe they don't know that the word "browser" means "program you use to view Web pages with"

This is my first thought. Most people don't think in terms of opening a web browser to access a web page they just "open the web."

45: Not exactly the same, but close.

http://www.columbusalive.com/content/stories/2012/08/23/qa-braden-kessler-cook-and-brony.html

46: Doesn't everyone remember the Netscape IPO and the Great Browser War between Netscape and Microsoft? Oh, yeah...they weren't born yet.

We can know 32 is fake because the alternative is that there is a God and he loves us.

41: My daughter is enraged that I won't let her watch the Zecora episodes. There's also another episode with buffalos wearing Indian feathers that is banned. I think the first Zecora episode is well-intentioned, but holy shit is it fucked up.

The very existence of Bronies is enough to make me happy.

When I think of positive aspects of the probability that the earth's population will soon hit a peak of 9 billion, I always wind up thinking of the sheer number of weirdos that will come with 9 billion people. I don't think weirdos are a straight percentage of the total population. If you double the population, you don't double the number of weirdos. Its more like an exponential function. Doubling the population means four times as many weirdos.

Its a beautiful thing.

If population grows linearly and the number of weirdos grows exponentially, at what point is everyone in the world a weirdo?

Now.

at what point is everyone in the world a weirdo?

Now?

Now@

GO NUTS!

When historians of the Weirdo Apocalypse of 2012 find this thread, we're going to have a lot of explaining to do.

But right now, I suppose I should start peeling the beets. We're going to need a whole lot of them.

Maybe all you guys are weirdos, but I'm normal.

I suppose I should start peeling the beets. We're going to need a whole lot of them.

Beet-loving weirdo.

Meh, Zecora doesn't seem any worse to me than Rafiki in The Lion King or Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance. Yes, kinda caricatural me-big-wise-shaman stuff, but there are nastier forms of racism out there than the Magic Negro. (I am intrigued though that Zecora is drawn just a touch more masculine than the other ponies. What is it about the idea of black women as actually feminine that's so threatening? Even when they're magic zebra ponies, the sisters can't catch a break.)

What is it about the idea of black women as actually feminine that's so threatening?

Gosh.

I did hear a person-on-the-street interview of some woman in Tampa who said of Obama, "I just don't like him. Can't stand to look at him. Her either. It's about time we had a proper First Lady, too, someone who acts like a First Lady, and looks like a First Lady."

Don't hold back! Tell us how you really feel!

This is going to be the Romney liveblog thread, right?

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jre7u7-downloads-1836441.html

This appears to be a patch.

That will stop the Romney-bot?

Meh, you are probably still better off without Java running on your browser anyway. And I say this as a Java programmer.

Man, Clint Eastwood was weird and hazy.

60: Yes, that was on NPR this morning. I seriously thought that might get a rise out of whoever the somnolent host was, but of course it didn't.

In a rational world (one in which 32 is true), the host would have started ranting at the correspondent: "Holy shit, did she really say that!? Did she not realize how completely RACIST that is!?!?!?"

On an unrelated note, one of my best friends did some man-on-the-streeting for Weekend Edition yesterday. He found two women saying how horrible the government is. One guess who employs them.

59 is totally right and I know about Zecora because Mara and watched the episode and I was shocked, but it had no impact on her. I'm just frustrated by it.

66: My entire childhood was funded by the Department of Defense, and I turned out an anarchist.

65: If nothing else, Eastwood helped Romney lock down the all-important "rambling, incoherent old guy who talks to people who aren't there" vote.

69. That demographic is increasingly important to Republicans.

The President's response to Eastwood's speech, in contrast, is all kinds of awesome.

Its funny how Republicans were totally hating on Eastwood after his "Halftime in America" commercial at the Superbowl, and now they are tripping over themselves to be in denial about his appearance at the convention not being a total train wreck. The cognitive dissonance is très impressionnant.

72: Do you just - you know - I know - people were wondering - you don't - handle that OK.

Romney's speech was pretty effective I thought. He knows what he's doing. Going to step away from any details and run on a platform of 'everything sucks and the only thing you can do about it is elect a new president'.

"rambling, incoherent old guy who talks to people who aren't there"

That's sort of my goal.

Addressing national conventions is probably not happening, but once you hit 65, the bus is free and if it is full, nobody can switch seats away from me.

76: And if it's not completely full, no one will choose to sit next to you.

||

There's a guy who works in a different part of the company than me, and I've passed him in the hallway numerous times over the years but never spoken to him or even heard him talking with anyone. And now I'm listening to him talk to somebody, and his voice sounds totally different than what I expected. Very weird.

|>

Clint Eastwood. Hollywood legend. Just told Barrack Hussein Obama to "make his day," along with thousands of Conservatives, Libertarians and Republicans in Tampa at the Republican National Convention.

In a moment that will be remembered for conventions to come, the gunslinger came out shooting. A steady aim at the Administration and the policies of the last four years. The Eastwood speech was steady and grit filled.

79: Ohhh. That's real. No word of a lie, I assumed the "Reagan hologram" story was the Onion and the "Romney will not talk about political, personal, or professional life in speech" story was just kind of blandly obvious (it's the Onion).

Along the same lines as 79, this is as impressive a mix of petulance, denial, and ressentiment as I've ever seen:

The media, naturally, is furious. They don't like to see Their Precious One mocked and they also understand the power of mockery -- which is why they keep Stewart and Colbert on such a tight leash. . . .

Had Eastwood said the things the media likes to hear with the same nervousness and hesitation, they would've called him wizened and seasoned. But because he mocked Their Precious One, suddenly he's some kind of embarrassment.

. . .

All I can say in response is: Go to hell you Obama-shilling crybabies. Eastwood showed more grit and honestly in those few minutes than you water carriers have during your entire propaganda-for-the-collective careers.

What Eastwood did tonight was funnier, fresher, edgier, and braver than anything those comedy cowards Chris Rock, Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert have done in 15 years.

79 is from Glenn Beck's website, 81 is from Breitbart's. Eastwood could have walked on stage and done armpit farts for 5 minutes and as long as he closed with "...and Obama sucks!" those crews would label it brilliant.

82: Even so, they are quite impressive examples of the genre.

they would've called him wizened and seasoned

Wizened? I'm not sure that word means what the writer thinks it means.

Fox news's website article about the Eastwood speech is bland, the article has about the same number of facebook likes as any other article about the convention. Nate Silver has Obama up in OH and CO.

Romney needs all three of VA, OH, FL, maybe more. Unless he suddenly becomes charismatic he won't get them all. Even FL looks like a tossup.

83: Oh, absolutely.

FiveThirtyEight is giving Romney a 28% chance of winning. I'm uncomfortable with how high that is.

"But if you ask Ann and I what we'd give, to break up just one more fight between the boys, or wake up in the morning and discover a pile of kids asleep in our room."

This kind of thing makes me sad. I want to say "too bad for your kids that you don't like them as much as adults." It also makes me sad when people use subjective pronouns after a transitive verb, but I've come to accept it.

The chance was above 30% after the first night of the R convention.

Romney is a wooden banker who said GM should have been allowed to fail. He's there because the second-most-popular R choice was Santorum, he's a placeholder. He has all of Dukakis' problems.

There are no pictures of him looking like Snoopy in a tank.

I don't really understand how to reconcile that with the percentage odds of winning individual states. It's hard to imagine Romney winning without winning Ohio. But that's already only a 30% chance, before even talking about Florida or Virginia or Colorado.

The one thing that I trust Obama 1000% on is to run a stellar campaign. I believe that he has not yet begun to fight (nationally, publicly. I believe the ground game is in full swing.)

But what the hell do I know. Nobody campaigns in Texas.

From my sampling of places I don;t know why I bother is that the "less insane" Repubs is that the Eastwood thing was a bit weird and bizarre but don't worry it bugged the "Liberals"*.

*Their evergreen standard of judgment for every speech act, policy proposal or news development.

It's hard to imagine Romney winning without winning Ohio

I guess he could trade it for Michigan, or Wisconsin + Ohio, or something else along those lines. But that doesn't seem to noticeably improve his odds.

I want to say "too bad for your kids that you don't like them as much as adults."

Have you checked to see if Hallmark has anything for that?

Wisconsin + Ohio

I meant Wisconsin + Colorado.

I got to think that picking Paul Ryan didn't do Romney any favors in Florida. All those old people don't cotton to shenanigans with teh Medicare.

Here on the ground in the heart of the heart of it all I'd give Romney about 40-45% chance in Ohio. I even saw 2 Romney yard signs in my neighborhood.

||

I thought we had agreed as a culture that talking loudly on your cell phone while taking a crap in a public restroom was rude.

|>

but don't worry it bugged the "Liberals"

Seems really weird that they think it bugged us. No one is exactly reeling from Clint's harsh criticism of the empty chair. Mostly I think it was sad.

100: It's fine in a private restroom?

Meh, you are probably still better off without Java running on your browser anyway. And I say this as a Java programmer.

When I turned off Java, unfogged wouldn't let me submit a comment! And a whole bunch of other things stopped working...

It also makes me sad when people use subjective pronouns after a transitive verb, but I've come to accept it.

You need to order one of these.

The data 538 has doesn't yet reflect any effect of the convention's last day (or possibly any days).

In thinking about this campaign I still don't think people are taking into account the Rs massive money advantage. We are about to see exactly what impact Citizens United had. Speaking of Ohio, look what outside funding has done so far to Sherrod Brown's polling numbers -- very popular guy and huge lead before the outside groups came in, now it's neck and neck.

Romney may be an utterly generic Republican candidate but I don't think he's a bad one. He is a bit charisma-challenged but unlikely to make any major gaffes, has no big scandals in his background, and has a reasonable resume.

Sure but so what, Romney is worse than "unnamed Republican."

More seriously, the polling assessments do not include "anti-fraud" disenfranchisement efforts being put into place.

Have the Diebold problems in OH gotten less serious since 2008? What happened with that in 2010?

I thought we had agreed as a culture that talking loudly on your cell phone while taking a crap in a public restroom was rude.

Sadly not, judging by what I hear in airport restrooms. It seems to be the preferred place to make business calls.

If that 538 model is wrong, I'm sure going to be pissed off, since I've relied on it for my sense of relative calm (and I know it doesn't reflect post convention numbers, but I expect the post convention bounce to be small and since the model anticipates a bounce it may even reduce Romney's chances).

Honey Boo Boo Child (on basic cae) handily beat the Republican convention among 18-49s, though I think the RNC had more viewers total.

The best response to 108 is to join in the conversation.

Or to start singing the Marine Corps Hymn, cf. John Glenn (Ed Harris) in "The Right Stuff".

We are about to see exactly what impact Citizens United had

I suspect that, on a presidential level, it probably reaches a point of diminishing returns really quickly. Especially given that almost everybody has already known who they were going to vote for for two years. I think this isn't really an issues/economy election, but mostly a cultural one. People are on one team or the other and aren't much open to persuasion.

On a state/local level (especially in smaller states and media markets), though, the impact could be enormous.

When I turned off Java, unfogged wouldn't let me submit a comment!

You probably turned off JavaScript, which is a completely different thing from Java, but shares a similar name because some marketing genius at Netscape in the mid-90s thought it was a good idea to mooch off the Java branding effort.

Don't turn off JavaScript, you need that.

In thinking about this campaign I still don't think people are taking into account the Rs massive money advantage.

Also all the people who were allowed to vote in 2008 and aren't allowed to vote anymore. The number is 18% in Philadelphia, for example.

114 -- there's an excellent (and calm inducing) discussion I that at 538.

Of. I am apparently turning into a Rasta.

Lively up yourself.

115: Link?

Oh, I guess this.

The number is 18% in Philadelphia, for example.

Voter ID is serious and real, but if makes you feel any better, it's NOT this bad. Really. That number isn't accurate, and there is a massive surge of organizing going on to educate and prepare people.

I don't think it's going to have a measurable impact on the presidental election, EXCEPT if the poll workers (for whom there is no statewide training plan) bog things down by being confused/more finicky than the rules actually require,* and we end up having long lines. Then people might go home and not vote.

It could definitely affect the downticket races, of course.

*Such as refusing to accept an out-of-state driver's license, which IS valid.

That's good. I guess it's good too that a sizable number of people Republicans WANT to vote will be unable to vote. After the election there will be some outrage from non-cynical people and the law will probably be scaled back.

What about those games they play with polling station hours and number? Or have the Republicans already maxed that out?

there is a massive surge of organizing going on to educate and prepare people.

Part of the impact of of the voter ID thing is to ensure that this massive surge of energy gets used up playing defense and is not available to be deployed elsewhere.

123: That's definitely true. However, it's also the case that a lot of the people doing Voter ID work would *not* otherwise have been doing political work. Many would, but many others would not.

The opportunity costs are substantial, but there are benefits too. I don't want to sound like Pollyanna -- goodness knows I'm exhausted just thinking about the impact of these assaults -- but there are actually some good things that can come out of being under attack.

Also, courts recently struck down Texas's redistricting and its voter ID law! Go courts!

I wonder if I should re-schedule my travel plans so I'm not out of the country on election day. I suspect I'll need to get drunk either way the election goes.

The one thing that I trust Obama 1000% on is to run a stellar campaign. I believe that he has not yet begun to fight (nationally, publicly. I believe the ground game is in full swing.)

But what the hell do I know. Nobody campaigns in Texas.

It was nervewracking here in California when Jerry Brown announced that he would not campaign before Labor Day. But he was entirely right. It has been wonderful, watching billionnaires throw pieces of their fortunes at campaigns to no effect. The money seems overwhelming, but it truly cannot buy charm.

That said, what do I know. Nobody campaigns in California (for national office).

I wonder if I should re-schedule my travel plans so I'm not out of the country on election day. I suspect I'll need to get drunk either way the election goes.

You should go ahead and travel. Having been outside of American territory on election day for the majority of the presidential elections in my adult life, I can offer you the consolation that it really minimizes the odds that you will run into anyone celebrating a Romney victory. Unless, of course, you're planning to be in Poland or Israel or something.

That said, what do I know. Nobody campaigns in [foo]

It feels weird to see the contrast. Amusing, funny, frightening, I'm not sure exactly what to call it, but weird. People campaign in Virginia, but not in DC. Virginia is just one metro stop away from DC. I've seen hundreds of ads on the metro and busses, but I think the first ad I saw in that context for Romney or Obama this year was when I went to Virginia for the first time in months.

127: My best friend was here visiting from California a couple of weeks ago and said he hadn't seen a single TV ad for the presidential race until he was in my house, where they run (what seems like) every break.

130: CA ditched his land line (in OH) because in election season it didn't. stop. ringing.

In PA, they just come to your house if you don't answer the phone.

I wonder if one silver lining to the Citizens United ruling is that the extra gazillions spent on political advertising might end up stimulating the economy. It could be a voluntary form of wealth redistribution, as the money that the top donors are pouring into the Super PACs was evidently doing nothing but burning holes in their pockets previously, and now that money is out there circulating in the economy. Maybe they really will end up being job creators after all.

It also makes me sad when people use subjective pronouns after a transitive verb, but I've come to accept it.

I can't accept it, but I really need to try, because the toll of the frustration is too much.

hadn't seen a single TV ad for the presidential race until he was in my house, where they run (what seems like) every break.

A person close to me lives in North Carolina, in a red-tinted exurban county, but close enough to the metro Charlotte market to get all the commercials. She told me that her eight-year-old daughter, upon hearing the name "Mitt Romney", scowled and said "He's the one who outsourced jobs to China and India!".

I've come to think of elections as an episodic way for rich vain people to transfer money to printers.

104: Oh, my God. I need to print that and post it above my seat at work. I printed out the OED definition of utilize and put it on the wall, because that verb is massively overused where I work.

||
Did Paul Ryan pull a Kip Litton?
|>

I am not registered to a party in California and I was getting called a lot a few weeks ago. The assumption seemed to be that non-party people don't pay much attention to the campaigns. After correctly identifying the candidates for state and national office and saying who I planned to vote for they've stopped calling me.

The House race here is an open seat and it's likely to be close.

Printers get some of the money, but the sheer amount of cash that gets frittered away on the presidential campaigns is amazing. So much of it has to end up in the pockets of consultants.

I always see references to how much "ad buys" cost, but does that mean that the campaigns' ad money goes directly to the media outlets' general fund? There's probably a corporate entity or twelve set up to take the money and shuffle it away into profits.

139: I enjoy your touching faith in the respect that political campaigns have for the knowledge and deliberation of potential voters.

The conversations were almost literally:

"Do you know who [local candidate] is?"

"Isn't [candidate] running for Congress?"

"Uh, yeah. Uh, have you decided who you're going to vote for?"

"Yes, [candidate]."

"Uh, ok. I don't really have any other questions."

The second call, a day later, started the same way and then asked me about Obama and Romney. I think the first was from the Democratic candidate's campaign and I got marked off the undecided list so they could concentrate on badgering other people.

138: Paul Ryan. Liar. Pass it on.

I call this gambit Somerby's Revenge.

I also get survey calls. I try to get them to tell me the number of questions - a range would be ok - and since they never do, I tell them that if there's too many to count, it's not going to be a short survey. I used to do surveys, but sometimes they've run 15-20 minutes, which is a lot of phone time for that kind of thing.

I used to do surveys, but sometimes they've run 15-20 minutes, which is a lot of phone time for that kind of thing.

I once did a project where we needed to call up a representatives of particular category of business in Canada and obtain some mildly sensitive price information. We weren't getting very good responses until I instructed the callers to begin by offering a $25 Tim Horton's gift card for participation. Almost everyone took the bait. Canadians: willing to cheerfully divulge confidential information for the price of a week's worth of donuts and coffee.

Canadians: willing to cheerfully divulge confidential information for the price of a week's worth of donuts and coffee.

I suspect you could get similar results in the US by offering Starbucks gift cards.

Another excellent reason for my employer to give us lots of free food. You're going to have to do a lot better than a Starbucks card to learn Google secrets!

147: I think I've spotted a chink in the armor: your employer doesn't offer free booze, does it?

Aside from Thursday/Friday-afternoon beer hour, the project groups that bought kegerators, and the occasional product-launch-celebration sparkling wine, I suppose not.

I'm starting to think of a way that my bourbon habit can provide my business with tax benefits.

91

I don't really understand how to reconcile that with the percentage odds of winning individual states. It's hard to imagine Romney winning without winning Ohio. But that's already only a 30% chance, before even talking about Florida or Virginia or Colorado.

The state outcomes are highly correlated. If Romney wins Ohio the odds that he will win other swing states go up a lot.

Paul Constant is quite good on the GOP convention:

[W]hen you really think about what is being said at this convention, you realize that all the red, white, and blue bunting and clothing and video imagery is a put-on. All the talk about patriotism, about supporting the troops, is just lip service. This is the most unpatriotic crowd I have ever been a part of. What they are against is community. Every sentence is devoid of empathy. Every finger-wag is aimed directly at an American who can't afford health insurance, who hasn't had a raise on their minimum-wage job in four years. Even as they rail against a statement that the president never really made, they are talking about tearing America down and leaving something meaner and greedier in its place. They're radicals--radicals who've gone over the edge and are trying to make their radicalism mainstream.

Yeah. Likewise Jon Chait:

The political logic embedded in Ryan's formulation was even more telling. He dismissed the goal of providing health insurance to those who can't afford it as something "we didn't even ask for." Who is "we"? We is the majority of Americans who do have health insurance. We outnumber the 50 million who don't. They can go screw themselves. Ryan actually called Obama's decision to cut what he deemed wasteful spending in Medicare to cover the uninsured his "coldest power play." It is a cold power play to give medical care to people who can't get it, and an act of compassion to take it away from them.

The whole thing is very much worth a read.

I was reflecting as I did errands this morning and listened on CSPAN radio to a Romney speech in Ohio -- in which he outlined again his 5-point plan to create 12 million jobs (really??) -- that I wouldn't be half so worried about the prospect of a Romney presidency, and god forbid they take the Senate as well, if I thought they were competent enough not to trash the nation. But I don't think they are. Ryan's budget plan is idiotic.

It's a consolation that in fact it is unlikely that Romney can win, given the setup of the electoral college. Still, this trend in something like half the country's thinking is really disturbing.

I wonder if I could get C-Span on the radio. I uncharacteristically spent several hours in the car recently and decided to listen to some talk radio. I came to three realizations:

1. What I loathe must about radio is how slowly people talk. NPR is just barely tolerable, but everything else (except Spanish-language radio) is so agonizingly slow and redundant as to make me want to throw things, regardless of the political content.

2. Hearing a conservative talk show host repeat "war on women" dozens of times made me very puzzled. Either he thinks his listeners are universally hearing it in a snarky, disparaging tone, or...?

3. Pat Toomey condemning Todd Aiken and telling him to get out of the race induced so much cognitive dissonance that I finally decided that it must just be that the party wanted a different Repub candidate to begin with, and the remarks are an excuse to (try to) get rid of him. Still, odd.

155: I think I can only get CSPAN radio because I'm relatively close to DC, and have a better radio/antenna in this car than I've ever had before? I can get it in the car in the driveway, but not in my house.

Today's political links:

"I am sick of the idea that being wealthy is risky. Being poor is risky."

Also: I don't know whether to be impressed that Ezra Klein is waking up, or angry at how deeply ingrained the six-year-old's notion of "fair" is in journalism.

Unfortunately, now that there seems to be broad agreement that the Romney-Ryan campaign won't be dictated to by fact-checkers is full of lies, deceit, and misleadership, the fair and balanced story will move on to quoting each campaign on what they think of the lies, the lies themselves being simply a new fact of nature, like the inexorable defunding of public education or the need for deficit reduction, which all serious people know is the fertilizer that when combined with the seed money of wealth transferred upwards, will stimulate the green shoots of recovery.

157.3: I've seen that Klein column quoted elsewhere as groundbreaking (for him). I hadn't actually read the whole thing.

It sounds like he's kicking and screaming. Which I guess is the six-year-old. I don't read him with any regularity - don't know if he always speaks in such pained ways.

I just read that Klein post, and wow, he's really turned into a caricature of a Broderite journalist obsessed with false balance. I haven't read him regularly in years, but back when I did (in his pre-WaPo days) he was a pretty typical liberal political blogger who would complain about journalists doing this exact thing. Props to Von Wafer, who predicted EK's trajectory with eerie prescience around the time his shift was starting.

fa in 158 is like to make me cry.

Even if 158 is true, it's worth remembering that the entire campaign is also still occurring in the context of the 99%/1% paradigm. It's pretty remarkable how much staying power that idea has had, even off the front pages.

Despite lurches in really counterproductive directions, there are also countervailing lurches such as Occupy.

Re: Klein, I see we discussed him in this 2007 thread.

You know what would be a really good professional norm for journalists to develop? Don't socialize with other journalists. Work with them, sure. But build your social circle around something else.

157.3: I've seen that Klein column quoted elsewhere as groundbreaking (for him). I hadn't actually read the whole thing.

I forwarded that column to a couple of people yesterday. I do think it's valuable. I thought the comparison to Palin's speech was a good pushback against the idea that politics are always going to be like this. More than that, I think that in this case the deliberate non-partisanship of the tone does make it more effective. Partisan attacks on the Republican positions and rhetorical are also necessary and valuable, but I think that essay is stronger for bracketing out the procedural complaints from the policy differences.

Also, I think Brad Delong's compliment is worth quoting.

Many other people working at the Post whom I have dealt with--Clay Chandler, Ruth Marcus, Jonathan Weisman, Dana Milbank, Glenn Kessler, and Lori Montgomery come immediately to mind--resolve the tension between looking fair and being fair by being careful to know as little as possible about policy substance, so that they have little idea of what actually "being fair" would be.

To his and their credit, Ezra Klein and his stable and Greg Sargent (and earlier, Dan Froomkin) are different. They recognize that being fair will lead to constant attacks by Republican hacks, and deal with it.

Re: Klein, I see we discussed him in this 2007 thread.

I haven't read the entire thread, but comment 12 did make me appreciate SCMT, and not for the last time.

162: the entire campaign is also still occurring in the context of the 99%/1% paradigm. It's pretty remarkable how much staying power that idea has had, even off the front pages.

Really? I guess I'm surprised. You're much more 'on the ground' than I am, so I'll believe you if it's true. My own impression has been that most people are out to save their own skins, the rest be damned (of course it is put more politely than that) -- but I've also been spending way too much time among the UMC lately. I need to correct that, because it's making me nuts.

The Paul Constant piece Apo links in 152 is very good.

138: He's admitted he took 4 hours to run a marathon.

I couldn't outrun him, but I could beat him I'm a plausible exaggeration contest.

I doubt it. I suspect he's a narcissist. You just don't have the lying experience to compete.

In some of the older threads here when people started in on the "before you know it, Yglesias and Klein will be just like all the other journalists, striving for false 'balance' [and so on]" lines, I thought they were overstating their case. But, although I still think Klein is much better than average, the extent to which they've mainstreamed and adapted standard journalistic practices has pretty much borne out the predictions.

Yeah, I thought they were overstating too, but I was wrong. Worth noting that the two Post writers DeLong praises in the quote in 163 came to the Post from liberal/progressive publications.

160: I was eerily prescient? I'm not sure I can believe that.

158 was overstatement, but kind of fun to write.

Which part? The eerily or the prescient?

152, 166: Yeah, the Paul Constant piece is terrific.