Mark Blumenthal, the famed Mystery Pollster, has an excellent post on the problems with Steven Freedman’s much-cited paper “The Exit Poll Discrepancy” (PDF). The short version is this: Freedman doesn’t really know what he’s talking about – he has a PhD in organization studies from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and is not an expert in polling. And, like many real or wanna-be public intellectuals, he’s gone outside his field of expertise and basically made a fool of himself (this is Richard Posner’s thesis in Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline). The exit polls were inaccurate, but the errors were most likely driven by relatively boring and mundane factors that Freedman wrongly dismisses as insufficient. The problem, of course, is that the combination of Freedman’s academic imprimatur and his insinuations that Bush’s victory might be illegitimate have further inflamed the tinfoil hat brigades, and the corrections will go largely unnoticed. Where is peer review when you need it?
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What is William C. Rhoden talking about?
In a frontpage story, the NYT columnist
Black fans, white fans and brown fans, spurred by alcohol and the more intoxicating prospect of turning an N.B.A. game into reality TV, fought with players on the court and in the stands. Let’s be very clear about this: the melee was caused by fans, drunken fans, riotous fans.
But the villain of this drama is Indiana’s Ron Artest. His foul on Detroit’s Ben Wallace, when the game was all but decided in the Pacers’ favor, was a dirty little push, but a far cry from his most flagrant fouls. It was the sort of irritating needle he is famous for.
An enraged Wallace pushed Artest in the face. The benches emptied. For effect, Artest stretched out his 6-foot-7 frame on the scorers’ table, drawing more attention to himself. When Artest was struck by a cup thrown by a fan, he leaped off the table and jumped into the stands, throwing wild punches as he climbed over the seats.
This makes no sense. Ron Artest was hit by a cup of ice. He was not punched or assaulted. The fan who threw it at him should have been thrown out of the game, but the riot started when Artest went into the stands. He was the one who escalated the incident into player vs. fan violence. After that, many fans and players shamed themselves, but the list of culprits for the riot has to start with Artest.
Update: I guess David Stern agrees – he suspended Artest for the rest of the season. Good.
The joke every sports columnist in America is writing right now: It looks like Artest will have plenty of time for that rap album…
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Stevens pounds the desk
There’s a famous legal maxim that says, “When the facts are against you, argue the law; when the law is against you, argue the facts; when both the facts and the law are against you, pound on the table.”
When Rep. Ernest Istook Jr. was caught inserting a provision into the omnibus appropriations bill allowing the Congressional appropriations committees to have access to anyone’s tax return, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens (an attorney) apparently remembered the advice he was given in law school:
Pounding on his desk, Stevens said he had given his word and so had Young that neither would use the authority to require the IRS to turn over individual or corporate tax returns to them. “I would hope that the Senate would take my word. I don’t think I have ever broken my word to any member of the Senate.”
“… Do I have to get down on my knees and beg?” he said.”
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The mandate debate rolls forward
Jan Freeman, the Boston Globe’s Word columnist, concludes her column on the mandate debate today with this strangely relativist conclusion:
Arguments, however, can’t settle the question: The proof of a mandate is in the governing. If the 2004 election produced one, we’ll see the evidence soon enough.
By this standard of legislative success, President Bush won a mandate when he lost the popular vote in 2000, which doesn’t make much sense at all. It’s certainly true that mandates are largely a social construction. But there’s a difference between admitting this fact and endorsing a “mandate” claim just because everyone else has.
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Politics goes Moneyball II
Following up on my last post on the increasing quantitative sophistication of politics, here’s Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman
Rather than dispatching troops to knock on doors in neighborhoods known to be heavily Republican, Mr. Mehlman said, the Bush campaign studied consumer habits in trying to predict whom people would vote for in a presidential election.
“We did what Visa did,” Mr. Mehlman said. “We acquired a lot of consumer data. What magazine do you subscribe to? Do you own a gun? How often do the folks go to church? Where do you send your kids to school? Are you married?
“Based on that, we were able to develop an exact kind of consumer model that corporate America does every day to predict how people vote – not based on where they live but how they live,” he said. “That was critically important to our success.”
He said that is what led him to the conclusion that supporters of Mr. Kerry had a preference for Volvos over Lincolns, and yoga over guns.
In addition, Mr. Mehlman said the Bush campaign had moved beyond simply placing advertisements on traditional television and radio networks. For example, he said, Mr. Bush began placing advertisements on in-house networks at private gyms, guaranteeing a captive audience of what he described as receptive voters.
“Because our demographic studies and analysis showed us that a lot of young families get information not at the 7 o’clock news but at the 7 o’clock workout before they got home,” he said.
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Filibuster-busting II
Bush courts Ben Nelson:
Meanwhile, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) was sounded out Friday by Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political adviser, about becoming secretary of agriculture, Senate sources said. In remarks to reporters, Nelson declined to say whether he had been offered the job or whether would take it. According to CNN, some Democrats said the administration may be trying to open the Nebraska Senate seat to a Republican.
And Fred Barnes lists some of the other targets for conversion:
Bush will need Democratic allies to bring about individual investment accounts in Social Security, to introduce free market forces into our health care system, and to create incentives to saving. The White House has Democratic senators in mind: Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, the four senators from North Dakota and Arkansas. Bush hopes to make tactical alliances with one or more of them without abandoning his principles. “No one’s saying it’s easy,” an aide comments. “It’s hard.” That’s putting it mildly.
These people know what they’re doing.
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A modest proposal
Can everyone stop saying 9-1-1 when they’re talking about Sept. 11? The pun on the phone number was clever for about ten minutes on Sept. 12. Now please stop. Thanks.
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Cultivating disaster
Here’s a useful rundown of some of the problems with our insane agricultural policies, which provide massive, inefficient and unnecessary subsidies to corporate agribusiness at the expense of small farmers and consumers. Even worse, these policies impoverish millions of developing world farmers (as the excellent New York Times series Harvesting Poverty documented), retarding development, destabilizing governments, and harming demand for US exports. Things must change for the good of the country and the world, but it’s not clear how to move reform forward given the power of the farm states in the Senate. Anyone have a creative idea?
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Idiotic celebrity alert
Why oh why does Linda Ronstadt think we care about her views on the war in Iraq?
“I worry that some people are entertained by the idea of this war. They don’t know anything about the Iraqis, but they’re angry and frustrated in their own lives. It’s like Germany, before Hitler took over. The economy was bad and people felt kicked around. They looked for a scapegoat. Now we’ve got a new bunch of Hitlers.”
Is someone handing out fortune cookies with bad Hitler analogies at a Hollywood restaurant? B-list celebrities of the world: leave us alone!