More Political TV Fun

Pretty spot on takeoff of the Apple Computer ads.



Funny and also very cutting. I happen to think that something like this perhaps executed just a teensy bit better would play quite well in most of the country. I think many people would find it a refreshing change from the odious drumbeat of: Candidate X wants to insert atrocity here. And heck, its true and everyone knows it. It does what a good political ad does, it clearly defines the strength and weaknesses of both sides. Yet it doesn't offend. Well, doesn't offend non-crazy people anyway.

Clinton County Dems TV Ad Blitz!

This ad was created by Jeff Hewitt and Kelly Fero at Fero Hewitt Global for Richard Morrison -- who ran against Tom DeLay in 2004 -- and the Fort Bend Democrats in Fort Bend County, Texas. I saw a copy on MyDD.com and contacted Richard Morrison. Long story short, in exchange for a few bucks to help the Fort Bend Dems defray their production costs and run more of the ad and a few bucks to the production house to re-tag the ad (the original Fort Bend Dems ad appears above) for Clinton County, we have a very professional, high-impact TV ad to run.

We did a buy of a couple thousand dollars on Mediacom. The ad will be appearing with increasing frequency between today and Election Day on basic cable channels such as: USA, HGTC, Discovery, CNN, ESPN/ESPN2, F/X, TBS, etc.

This is a great example of how networks can help local parties pool resources and creative people to allow those local parties to really engage voters in ways that were previously unavailable to them. Even as recently as 2002, the idea that the Clinton County Democratic party and a county party somewhere else in the country would be able to hook up and run professionally produced television spots would have been almost unthinkable.

Rural Voters Poll Part 2

The Center for Rural Strategies has released the results of its second round of polling of rural voters in 41 contested congressional districts. I blogged the original poll here and posted follow-up comments from CRS Vice President Tim Marema here back in September

Here are the key findings of the follow-up poll:

• Rural battleground voters have shifted toward Democratic
  candidates since our first poll in mid-September.


• These voters favor Democratic House of Representative candidates
  by 13 points (52-39). In September rural voter preferences were
  evenly split among House candidates


• In contested Senate races, rural voters favor Democratic
  candidates by 4 points, 47-43, reversing the 4-point lead
  Republicans held in September.


• Concern about the war is a top issue for 38 percent of the
  respondents. In September, 28 percent of respondents named the war
  as a top concern.

My main concerns with this otherwise overwhelmingly good news (for Democrats) is the turnout issue. Will these voters be turned off by what seems to me to be one of the most negative campaign climates in recent memory? Most of the time rural voters, who also tend to be older, are one of the most dependable voter categories from a turnout standpoint.

This poll also reinforces what I've been trying to get through the heads of people at the local party: It's the War Stupid!

Oh well, too late now. All efforts now turn to GOTV and let the chips fall where they may.

Yes, I'm Still Here

Real life is a bitch. Reasons for not blogging:


Building a Haloween Parade Float. The float below is not ours, it is the Buell Elementary float, which won. Thank God we are merging with them next year. I for one welcome our new Buell Overlords.












Major League Soccer playoffs . The Fire opened the playoffs at home last Sunday against the NE Revolution and won, 1-0. I'm in the smoke down there somewhere.














Last but certainly not least, my new position as Senior Director of IT Services for Effective Networking. There is a lot to do and learn in a new job.

More soon though. Update on the new Rural Voter poll coming later.

Google Takes Over The World!

The big tech news over the last day or so is Google buying YouTube for $1.65BN. Certainly a big, fat, hairy deal in the media world and for the future of media disintermediation, as discussed recently.

But lost in that blockbuster M&A activity is the refinement of an older Google service, online word processing and spreadsheets. Google has had free to use word processor called Writely for many months now. No application needs to be installled on the computer and files can be stored online or on the local PC. This week they have added an olnine spreadsheet and opened docs.google.com for business. Search Engine Watch wraps it up but Barry Ritholtz asks the important questions:

Three questions about this:

1) How easily is it to integrate Excel -- a desktop app -- into the website versus a internet-based spreadsheet?

2) Have these free web based apps evolved to the point where they are a legitimate competitor to Excel?

3) How much share can this steal?

This is a far more refined app than I previously perceived it to be . . .

To which I respond in the comments:

Let's look at your questions.

1. If you noticed when you were playing with it, one can import and export not only from .xls formats but also other common file formats. I uploaded a cash-flow statement on multiple sheets here. So, the answer this question is: pretty easy.

2. At the basic and middling-advanced levels -- which is the core competency level of about 80% of the people using these apps -- it looks feature comparable. I don't see pivot tables and graphs... yet. But again, for basic stuff like budgets, pro-formas, schedules and simple statistical analysis it looks pretty good in comparison to Excel.

3. Let's look at Mister Softee's pricing on Office 2003:
Office Student and Teacher (Academic Only) $149.00
Office Basic (OEM Only) $184.00
Office Standard (Lowest Cost Retail) $399.00
Office Professional $499.0o

Google Office: Free.

That said, the Open Office Project has offered a feature-complete, very compatible with Office free desktop suite for more than three years now. The 2.0 release is very good performance-wise on newer hardware. Yet OO (and StarOffice, the Sun Microsystems non-free version for Sun OS) only have about 14% of the enterprise market.

On the third hand. Google has cachet. The Google apps are absurdly easy to use and do not require a download or install. I think this kind of thing just sends big shivers down the spine of Mister Softee.

Rove to Evangelicals: Suckers!

Oh goody, goody, more Jackass Schadenfreude.

The ever-swelling ranks of former Bush Administration functionaries who are either shamelessly kicking the shins of their former bosses upon leaving public services or, publicly distancing themselves from the profoundly shortsighted policies and mismanaged execution of same has expanded by one. Former Special Assistant to the President for Faith-Based initiatives, David Kuo has written a book. Kuo's tell-all unveils *suprise* an office used almost exclusively to win political points with both evangelical Christians and traditionally Democratic minorities.

Kuo, who has complained publicly in the past about the funding shortfalls, goes several steps further in his new book.

He says some of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders were known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as “the nuts.”

“National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy,’” Kuo writes.

More seriously, Kuo alleges that then-White House political affairs director Ken Mehlman knowingly participated in a scheme to use the office, and taxpayer funds, to mount ostensibly “nonpartisan” events that were, in reality, designed with the intent of mobilizing religious voters in 20 targeted races.

According to Kuo, “Ken loved the idea and gave us our marching orders.”

Among those marching orders, Kuo says, was Mehlman’s mandate to conceal the true nature of the events.

Keith "Good Night And Good Luck" Olberman will discuss the book tonight on Countdown and so too apparently will 60 Minutes on Sunday.

More Polling IA-01 Whalen Momentum?

Missed this last week but Zogby poll taken 9/25 to 10/2 completely flip-flops all the other poll data in the Whalen-Braley Race, marking it 47 - 34 for Whalen. That's totally at odds with the previous polls I posted on here and here.

Starting in late August a RT Strategies poll had the race as Braley 54 - 41 Whalen. Then on September 9-13, Selzer and Co for the Des Moines Register had Braley 44 - 37 Whalen.

Looks like the negative ads are working on Bruce. Or that polling in Iowa is whacked. Or both.

The Erectile Dysfunction of Kim Jong Il.

And here I thought that after 1989 all that classwork on strategic weapons and nonproliferation was just a waste of the 12 credit hours. But no, because when I heard on CNN yesterday that the South Koreans were saying that Sunday's nuke test was about .55 kilotons and measured 3.5 on the Richter scale, I started scratching my head. That's barely moving the needle in the world of nuclear weapons. After all our first little Gadget, had a yeild of about 19 kilotons or like, 34 times bigger than that little fizzle. So, if I were Dear Leader, I wouldn't be calling too much attention to my teeny little tool.

And although I'm pretty confident I know what I'm talking about I'm glad to see that intelligence officials are quietly putting the word out on the street:

One intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said U.S. intelligence agencies detected an explosive event in North Korea with a force of less than a kiloton. Historically, the types of devices used in initial nuclear tests have yielded several kilotons of force. One kiloton is defined as the energy produced in an explosion of 1,000 tons of TNT.

"We cannot confirm if it was a nuclear explosion," the official said Monday morning.

Another U.S. government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of political sensitivity of the situation, said the seismic event could have been a nuclear explosion, but its small size was making it difficult for authorities to verify that.

The Arms Control Wonk is also a playa hata, quoting French sources (and like wine, they know a few things about nukes) confirming the 550 ton estimate. He also links to the way cool IRIS seismology data sets.

And while that is also beyond my skillset, Kevin Drum in the Washington Post appears to know some actual seismologists who confirmt that all signs point to explosive dysfunction .

Takeaways:

• The North Koreans could not back up the talk when it counted. Their "bomb" was a dud.


• The media has its collective head up its ass with regards to any science above about 3rd Grade level.


• While the ntelligence agencies around the world privately snigger behind their hands at Kim Jong-Il's impotence, the prudent thing for the diplomats to do is to treat this as if it were a real bomb. This way the crisis mode may move thus-far recalcitrant China (who has reacted very negatively to it's client's actions) and Russia to put the screws to the NORKS to and restart serious talks so that everyone can step down from the cycle of proliferation. In that sense, some good may yet come of this.


• Bill Clinton's greatest foreign policy failure -- for which we yet may all anwer to your eternal regret -- was allowing Pakistan and India to have the bomb and get away scot-free. This has set a precedent for any reasonably organized society with access to money and time to justify nuclear ambitions.

Absurdly Large Outlier In The History of BLS Revisions

I hate to be a blogger that just posts other blog posts but Barry Ritholtz's morning post really needs to be widely distributed. Click all images for larger versions.

The Big Picture: Abusrdly Large Outlier In The History Of BLS Revisons:

Yes, we know that 51k new jobs stink; No, it was not a "perfect number" (Attention Mark Zandi: please lay off the Psilocybin before airtime).

Notable beneath the awful headline was the even more astounding adjustment: Payrolls for the 12 months ended in March 2006 will be revised higher by 810,000

Thanks to this adjustment, the BLS now claims that job growth during the 12 months ended in March 2006 was 45 percent higher than previously reported. The revision magically adds payroll employment growth between March 2005 and March 2006 up by a 67,500 per month.

This was the biggest revision since the Labor Department started benchmarking in 1991. To make a comparison, "the aggregate benchmark revisions dating back to 1996 added a whopping 1,555K jobs to the economy, 810K of which (52%) were added during April 2005-March 2006!"

Reuters noted that: "The historical average for the benchmark revision over the prior 10 years has been plus or minus two-tenths of one percent...BLS currently is researching possible sources for this larger-than normal expected revision."

This benchmarking is 100% larger than the largest prior numerical revision, and 50% larger than the prior percentage revision:

The ironic thing is that even after this revision, this still remains the worst job creation cycle in the post WWII era . . .

~~~

I need to do some more research into how credible (or INcredible) this revision is. But at first blush, it is an absurdly large outlier relative to prior benchmarking in BLS revisions . . .

I'm guessing that the Rovian cadres have finally penetrated and compromised the inner circle of the professional statisticians at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But we won't know for sure until after 2008.

One more thing on jobs courtesy of the incomparable Ritholtz via the NYT from a few months agao is this anlysis of the demographics of job growth in the last 6 years compared to the period 1966-2000.



It is kind of a tricky graph. Obviously in the 1966-2000 period one sees a lot of women entering the workforce. But the right hand column showing change in the last six years shows that the few jobs that are being created are on the older end of the specrum. The formerly retired set returning to low-wage jobs to supplement their meager pensions. This probably also accounts for the increase in unemployment among the younger brackets as the percieved-to-be more reliable older set displace youth in these jobs.

Pew Poll: God Gap Closing

From the Washington Post:

Even a small shift in the loyalty of conservative Christian voters such as Sunde could spell trouble for the GOP this fall. In 2004, white evangelical or born-again Christians made up a quarter of the electorate, and 78 percent of them voted Republican, according to exit polls. But some pollsters believe that evangelical support for the GOP peaked two years ago and that what has been called the "God gap" in politics is shrinking.

A nationwide poll of 1,500 registered voters released yesterday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that 57 percent of white evangelicals are inclined to vote for Republican congressional candidates in the midterm elections, a 21-point drop in support among this critical part of the GOP base. Emphasis mine. - cman

Even before the Foley scandal, the portion of white evangelicals with a "favorable" impression of the Republican Party had fallen sharply this year, from 63 percent to 54 percent, according to Pew polls.

In the latest survey, taken in the last 10 days of September and the first four days of October, the percentage of evangelicals who think that Republicans govern "in a more honest and ethical way" than Democrats has plunged to 42 percent, from 55 percent at the start of the year.

As I've said before, I'm not entirely convinced that sane Democrats should want any part of the next two years. I'm perfectly content to play rope-a-dope and run out the clock on the Bush Administration. I'm actually amused by them now. My level of reaction to their governance over the past six years has gone from:

• Shoulder-shugging bemusement as they inevitably implemented the policies everyone knew they would once elected.


• Anger at the sheer gall of the omnipenetration of partisan hackery into every level of policy pre-9/11.


• Rage at the pissing away of the world's goodwill and our country's good name on this mind-numbingly incompetent Global War on Terrur.


• And finally in the last week or so to a very odd feeling -- I'm sure there is a German word for this -- of slack-jawed disbelief and sick amusement such as one might feel upon watching an especially dangerous and sick prank go wrong. For lack of a better phrase, let's just call it Jackass Schadenfreude.

So, actually I'm kind of facinated to see what they will come up with if left to their own devices for two more years.

A lot can change in four weeks but at this point I'm prone to say that if the Democrats don't regain Congress the party should be disbanded and Rahm Emmanuel, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid should be sued for political malpractice.

Ditto for Chet Culver, who if he looses to that hack Nussle should be run out of the state.

Media Disintermediation

I'm assuming that most people who read this site have at least once or twice visited YouTube. You probably went there to view some disgusting or amusing clip. If that's all you think of it as you are doing yourself and injustice and you are missing some interesting and very important trends in the media. YouTube and similar services, especially The Democracy Player/Project and Current TV are beginning to pry eyeballs away from the media conglomerates and to so-called user-generated (or amatuer) content. And a lot of that content is very, very good.

Channel Federator collects animatated shorts and classic cartoons in weekly episodes of a quality only seen in art house cinema.

New Hope Seattle is a Gospel Church in Seattle. Their vlog documents their work building up their community and their new church.

Make Magazine is the weekly vlog of Make Magazine, the hobbist's guide to... making stuff. Very cool.

Entertainment abounds. The Tiki Bar provides an ongoing storyline while teaching how to make a different exotic drink each episode. Siren is "an action/adventure seires in the tradition of the old movie serials. It is the story of a beautiful and mysterious industrial thief with a talent for marital arts and a taste for revenge." Think Alias meets Buster Keaton.

And of course there is lots of stuff on politics and current events from prog-fave Media Matters to Willie Nelson

So, based on all that there is some alarm in the DIY Video community about news that Current TV owner, Al Gore (Yes, that's, what he's been doing when he's not hectoring us about global warming.) has signed a deal with Rupert Murdoch to carry Current TV on BSkyB extending Current TV's viewership to 8M households in the U.K. and Ireleand.

The pair have now come together to promote user generated content in the UK and Ireland. Current TV’s agreement for the channel to be carried on BSkyB’s satellite platform is its first international move outside the US.

Mr Gore said that the channel was one of the few on the cable network to break even in the first year and was looking to make profits in the second year. He rejected suggestions that viewer created clips was about gaining cheap content.

The deal with BSkyB brings Current TV to some 8m households. In the US, it is available in nearly 30m homes through cable and satellite television. With Current TV, viewers and producers upload their clips on to the channel’s website, where content which gets the most votes is broadcast on its television channel.

Mr Gore compared Current TV to the introduction of the printing press in the 15th century, which led to enlightenment. He said: “The television medium for 50 years has had the depressing effect on the conversation of democracy by excluding individuals. But the new affordable digital tools of both cameras and digital video cameras and laptop editing systems now make it completely feasible for individuals with accessible training to participate in the conversation.”

Mr Murdoch said that Mr Gore’s channel TV was “an elegant way” to marry user-generated content on the web to the broadcast medium. He said: “Current TV is bringing the web’s sense of empowerment to television for the first time.”

Current TV is already broadcast on a number of cable systems. But that's not the point. Current TV or Democracy (which is where most of the content listed above is aggregated through), don't care whose network they ride to the end user. It isn't about the delivery mechanism, satellite, cable or internet. At the end of they day they are all the same. At least right now.

The important thing is that fresh, open and interesting content become more accessable; the most voices avialable to the most people. The end result is (hopefully) more local programming, a less mallebale mass media and (probably least "important" but most "interesting") better quality entertainment.

Work Status

A very nice consulting gig sort of fell out of the sky in the best possible way. I've been getting paid to do some economic development work that I would have done anyway, albeit in the half-assed, whenever-I-get-around-to-it way that a volunteer does it. Been having a great time meeting people, being an uber-geek but I've been busy. One has to actually earn those big consulting bucks.

Study War Some More

Brad DeLong on the value of military history:

The highly intelligent David Bell gets his arrow into the target, but nowhere near the center. He writes:

Open University: The founders of [the modern social sciences]... believed that warfare was something fundamentally irrational and primitive that would disappear.... War was simply not something whose processes could be usefully elucidated....

As long as history remained as much an art as a science... it was not really affected.... The great nineteenth century historians--Michelet, Macaulay, Parkman, Ranke--all gave pride of place to war, and did a great deal of what would now be described as "operational" military history. But when historians embraced the social sciences... they took on the social sciences' assumptions and interests, and therefore turned away in large part from military questions....

Now, we can deplore all of this, and we should--the great narrative historians had a much better sense of the fundamental importance of military history than we do. But we can't simply ignore it. The fact is that "operational" military history remains separated by a large gulf from... our most important intellectual traditions in the social sciences and humanities, and to the questions.... On the whole, it tends to be more technical, less open to interdisciplinary dialogue, and less self-aware than most other areas of history. As Sir John Keegan, who is a very very good military historian, once complained: "Not even the beginnings of an attempt have been made by military historians to plot the intellectual landmarks and boundaries of their own field of operations." This is not a statement that could possibly be made about cultural history, social history, economic history or political history....

In short, yes, this is a question of liberalism. But the "liberals" who are really to blame here are not the familiar American "tenured radicals" whom the National Review so loves to hate. They are named Montesquieu, Condorcet, Benjamin Constant and Karl Marx.

Three points here:

First, simply no, there should not be more "operational" military history. "Operational" military history of the style beloved of the National Review tells us relatively little about war. If you want to know about the American Civil War, you need to hear something like this:

Not even the deep South was strongly for secession. Those voting for delegates to Georgia's secession convention, for example, were almost evenly split--and you can bet that the African-Americans who did not get to vote for delegates were overwhelmingly against secession. Because there was no Southern consensus for secession, Lincoln was able to hold the border--Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, western Virginia, eastern Tennessee--by making it a war for the Union. And the war began with a Confederacy of 5 million whites (and 4 million African-Americans) and a Union of 21 million whites (and 1 million African-Americans).

The Union mobilized 2.6 million soldiers--24% of its total male population. The Confederacy mobilized 900 thousand soldiers--36% of its white male population. Armies would march down secured railroad lines or navigable waterways until they ran into other armies. Because they could not function far from railhead or water-based supply depots, strategic outflanking moves were rare. When armies clashed, casualties were horrendous, but decisive victories impossible. The rifled musket was too good in defense, and the large size of the armies made them too clumsy in pursuit.

The result was that the armies fought, and soldiers died in battle, afterwards of wounds, and in camp of disease. By April 1865 300,000 Union soldiers were dead, 300,000 more were disabled by wounds, about 200,000 had deserted and returned home, and 400,000 had been discharged--leaving 1.4 million with the colors. By April 1865 300,000 Confederates were dead, 300,000 more were disabled by wounds, and 300,000 had deserted or returned home--leaving next to nobody with the colors to surrender to Grant and Sherman. The war was then over.

That's the history of the American Civil War wie es eigentlich gewesen. That's not the history you get by reading "operational" military historians like Shelby Foote or Bruce Catton. They do what they do excellently, but it is a distorted vision of the war.

Second, the current state of military history looks, to me, extremely good. I think that better military history is being written now than ever before. Why, from where I am sitting right now I can see six excellent recent books of military history: Robert Citino's The German Way of War, David Glantz and Jonathan House's When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, Omer Bartov's Hitler's Army, Gordon and Trainor's Cobra II, Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites, and Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain. It is much easier to get an education in military history than ever before.

That's the past history of warfare. To study the future of war, go here

Moral Turpitude

At what point exactly does the GOP have to stop portraying itself as the party of moral righeousness? Isn't there some sort of slaughter rule we can invoke? A referee we can appeal to? Because Ex- Rep., Mark Foley (R-FL) is just the latest in a long line of crooks, charlattans, and self-hating homosexuals which appears to be the normative condition when it comes to moral lapses. At least when Democrats get caught doing the nasty its usually straight sex with a consenting adult. I know what you're thinking and Barney Frank doesn't count because, a) he's been openly gay since I can't remember and, b) when he got caught and censured his constituents didn't seem to give a damn and have returned him every two years since.

So can we stop with the self-righteousness already? At least with Democrats you know what you're getting; power-hungry and horny but willing to do the people's business. The Republican leadership seems to be just shot through with repressed wierdos who furtively indulge their secret kinks while wiping their asses with the Constitution. The semen seems to have backed up into their brains because what sort of mental midget propositions a 16 year-old via email for crissakes. This is 2006, when will these losers ever learn that it all gets recorded?

So, here's my new campaign slogan: Vote Democrat; Sure We're Horny But We Can Balance The Budget.

I can't wait for the election to be over so I can get back to thinking about really important stuff, like the economics of ethanol and global warming.