closing in

I hope my New York friends have power again and that life is trending towards normalcy...  sounds like it's been a crazy week!



Hmm, ya think?:

On a lighter note...

There's a lot of chatter going on about how seriously to take Nate Silver... Politico's coming out swinging against him, insisting the race is a toss-up, with 'momentum' on Romney's side.  For my money, the best two takes are this and this.  I don't think people understand what he's really saying... if he gives Romney has a 25% chance of winning*, he means just that:  flip a coin twice and if you got heads both times, Romney's President.  That's a real chance.

That's not to say that if we somehow re-ran election day over and over again we'd get different results.  There's only one answer, but given the information available there are limits to how certain we can be in predicting it... that's what Nate's trying to quantify.

This really is Moneyball, redux.  The baseball managers had all these insidery ways of analyzing players, like how hot their girlfriends were (denoting 'confidence'), but some kid crunching numbers put them all to shame.  Math beats B.S.

*As of this writing Silver's giving Obama an 85.1% chance.  As the clock runs out there's less time for things to change, hence Obama's odds increase even as the race remains fairly stagnant.


Sully:  "The great thing about reality is that eventually you hit it.  We are about to."



Here's hoping Obama's turn-out machine lives up to it's rep.



Romney Rules special edition: the meta-ethics of the post-truth campaign



Ed Kilgore wins best metaphor for the week: "Mitt's Doritos Turn Into a Kitten."



Ezra Klein had a couple posts this week that pretty well sum up the current state of our politics...

In "A Portrait of Washington in 2012" shows how Washington is forced to come up with convoluted ways of accomplishing things, even when all sides basically agree, because anything the Obama Administration is on the record as supporting must by definition be implacably opposed by Republicans.

And then in "Mitch McConnell's and John Boehner's Strategy Worked" he argues that a recent batch of newspaper endorsements for Romney, on grounds that he unlike Obama, will be able to work with Congress, show that the Republicans "just say no" approach made for effective politics.


A vote for Romney is a vote for partisan gridlock, because it will be clear that that's the most efficient route for an opposition party to get back into power (especially since the press is clearly not interested in calling such behavior out.)




There are are a lot of good reasons to vote against Romney, but Jonathan Chait reminds us we have someone we can be proud to vote for: "The Case for Obama:  Why He is a Great President.  Yes, Great."

On the other hand, it's important to consider the other side's point of view:

This is non-political (well, unless you count 19th century politics), but funny: