OK, America, you can start ignoring Ohio again

As is my custom, I voted before coming in to work. There was quite a crowd but the polling place was well organized and efficient. The ballot was long, what with judges and referenda that had to be decided. Our precinct uses optical scanning machines so the ballot has those bubbles that have to be filled in to indicate your vote. Since I am the kind of person who likes to fill in the little ovals very neatly, staying carefully within the lines, that took some time but I was still out in about 20 minutes. [Read more…]

The award for the stupidest Romney endorsement

David Frum, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, is supposed to be one of the ‘sane Republicans’, a breed that is on the verge of extinction. Kevin Drum points to his strange argument as to why it is better for Mitt Romney to win.

Frum says:

The congressional Republicans have shown themselves a destructive and irrational force in American politics. But we won’t reform the congressional GOP by re-electing President Obama. If anything, an Obama re-election will not only aggravate the extremism of the congressional GOP, but also empower them: an Obama re-election raises the odds in favor of big sixth-year sweep for the congressional GOP – and very possibly a seventh-year impeachment. A Romney election will at least discourage the congressional GOP from deliberately pushing the US into recession in 2013. Added bonus: a Romney presidency likely means that the congressional GOP will lose seats in 2014, as they deserve.

Basically he is saying that although the Republican congress is nuts, if Obama is re-elected, they will go even more nuts and completely blow up the country. So vote Republican!

Yes, even the sane Republicans have gone nuts.

How media consensus was reached on the debates

Do you remember the time when you were an adolescent? That was the time when you could roughly split people into three groups: the trendsetters, the trend followers, and those who deliberatively chose to go against prevailing trends, irrespective of whether they were good or bad. Most people fell into the second category, people who would usually look around to see what the ‘correct’ thing was to say or do, for fear of being out on a limb and thus open to scorn from their peers. [Read more…]

Irrational Obama hate

As the campaign winds down and feeling start running high, people tend to be more unguarded in what they say. We thus witness high levels of irrational hatred of Barack Obama that would be truly a wonder to behold if it were not also scary to see that some people live in an alternate reality where manifestly self-contradictory views can be held in the same mind with complete lack of awareness. [Read more…]

The difference between state and national poll predictions

One of the puzzles of the current presidential election has been the divergence between the national polls (which indicate a close race with the lead fluctuating between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney) and the predictions of the poll aggregators based on state polling which have had Obama showing a fairly steady lead that would result in around 300 electoral votes. [Read more…]