The real winners of elections – political consultants

Conservative Erick Erickson, searching for a culprit for Republican losses in the last election other than the conservative message itself, finds it in the greedy and incestuous world of political consultants within the Romney campaign, where a small, tight band of people enriched themselves by charging huge fees to give ‘advice’ to the candidate that resulted in campaign money flowing to companies that they themselves were associated with. [Read more…]

Reality and the pundits

One of the benefits of being a modern pundit is that there is no price to be paid whatsoever for being totally wrong. Let me be clear that there is nothing bad about being wrong. After all, when you are predicting any outcome that is not certain, there is always the possibility, however carefully you do your analysis, of the actual outcome being one that is not the most likely, one that lies in the tail of the probability distribution. [Read more…]

The strange appeal of soap operas

I was once getting my hair cut and listened to the conversation my barber was having with a friend seated nearby. They were recounting a terribly complicated story of something that seemingly happened to a common friend of theirs. Towards the end I said that I was sorry to hear about their friend’s terrible plight when they laughed and said that they had been discussing their favorite TV soap opera. But they were really invested in it and the way they talked about it was as if those characters were part of their lives. [Read more…]