Moment, Linger On

Can they stop complaining now?

Yesterday the California Supreme court voided 4000 gay marriages performed in San Francisco earlier this year. I'm a supporter of marriage equality (as I've said before here), but this is still good.

Good because this is how the courts are supposed to work. They are supposed to review federal, state, and (in this case) local statutes and rule on their constitutionality and legality. That's what courts do.
If this had gone the other way you would have conservatives howling about "legislating from the bench," but that's not what ever happens. Sometimes judicial review goes your way and sometimes it doesn't and sometimes the courts are correct in their rullings and sometimes they aren't, but judicial review in itself isn't the same as "making up new laws" and it is pure ignorance to say that it is.

Stick with what you know

Laura Bush on stem cell research:

I know that embryonic stem cell research is very preliminary right now and the implication that cures for Alzheimer's are around the corner is just not right.

Yes, Laura, we all realize that. That's why it is so important to fund basic research. The kind that sets the stage for the research that yields these miraculous cures and, also, the type of research that is most helped by government funding.

I'd advise her to stick to topics she knows something about in the future. I'd suggest "how to raise crass spoiled children" or "soothing the damaged ego of a simple-minded spouse."

I see that the incomparable Tbogg agrees.

What country are they from?

Shorter Mark Steyn: Nobody wants to hear about John Kerry's Vietnam war experience. That's old news. And why would anyone want to vote for him otherwise?

Sure Mark. You're welcome to your opinion on this. And of course you will be voting for the other guy. What? You won't? Oh, that's right, you aren't eligible to vote for anybody because you're Canadian. Sure, Mark, you have a right to an opinion just like every other carbon based life form in the universe, but when it comes to political commentary I'd just as soon listen to someone who has the same interests that I do.

What is it with the right, anyway? Do they love outsourcing so much that they farm out their opinion and policy writing to other countries as well? Mark Steyn, David Frum, Andrew Sullivan, John Derbyshire, and so on. The next time you hear one of those people blathering on, remember that they don't have the same obligations or interests as you do.

And yes, I realize that Derbyshire has US citizenship and that Sullivan might as well. But I seriously doubt that they surrendered their UK passports (as they were required to do since the US doesn't allow dual citizenship for adults) when they took the oath. I'd bet a lot on that one.

She's back

Laura's moved in, sort of, and she has a new home on the web as well. Welcome back, Laura.

Given that I live here...

You're Maryland!
You enjoy contemplating your navel so much that you want to build a whole school devoted to said purpose. You like Chevy Chase a ton as well, maybe even more than Cal Ripken since he started doing those Century 21 commercials. Mostly, though, you want to kick back, watch the ballgame, and eat crabcakes. Brick is by far your favorite building material. You might even call yourself a brick house.
Take the State Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

I suppose it is good that I live where I am. While I like where I live well enough, I couldn't help wishing that I had been Oregon or Maine instead.

(I also wish that the quiz people had formatted their HTML code so that the image fit on my page. Try again, guys...)

Understanding political polls, part one: 1 out of 20

With all the interest in this year's election there are a good number of people who are driven into a frenzy with all of these polls, trumpeting the latest poll results and assigning a good deal of meaning to them. There are other, more cynical, people who refuse to believe that anything meaningful could be gained from polling such a small number of people, especially when they are never called themselves. Over the next few days I'll try to explain how these polls work with an eye to answering the following questions:

1. What does the margin of error mean?

2. How is it calculated?

3. Are polls always correct?

4. How many people are really needed to accuately poll?

5. Why do polls by different organizations always seem to differ in similar ways?

Today I'll try to briefly answer questions one and three.

What does the margin of error mean?

The margin of error (or MOE) in the poll is the range that you can expect reality to differ from the results of the poll. For instance, if a poll between Bush and Kerry results in Kerry 48% and Bush 44% with a MOE of 3% then the real split in the entire population should be somewhere between 45% and 51% for Kerry and somewhere between 41% and 47% for Bush.

Are polls always correct?

No. There is a magic number built into every poll called the confidence interval. For political polls the confidence interval is 95%, which means that the poll will be within the margin of error 95% of the time. (For medical or engineering tests, where the results matter, the CI will often be 99% or higher. For politics 95% is good enough.) What this means, and nobody ever mentions this, is that one out of evey 20 polls should be way off base with reality differing from the poll by more than the margin of error.

Next: How is the margin of error computed?

A challenge for Bush supporters

I'm not persuadable at this point. I'm going to be voting for Kerry no matter what. But pretend for a second that I was. Think of this as a chance to fine tune your arguments before going after someone who is still undecided.

My challenge, then, is this. Come up with just one example from George Bush's life that could cause me to believe that he is a decent human being. Just one. And abstract nonsense like "I admire his faith" or "I think he would never lie to me" or "I think he is a good parent" or "I like his stance on position X" doesn't count. I'm talking about one specific thing that he has done in his life that would make me think that he is a good man.

I'll give you an example for John Kerry. I admire John Kerry because he volunteered to serve in combat in Vietnam when he could have easily avoided doing so. Now you can come back at me with all sorts of stuff about whether he deserved his silver star or not or how you don't like how he came out against the war after he came back or whatever. But his going in the first place, I would maintain, was an objectively good thing to do and a credit to his character.

Come up with just one example for Bush for me. Just one. And until you do I will continue to believe that, like Carville said, Kerry is just a better man than George Bush.

Five in a row

Kevin Drum points out the similarity between Bush's 2004 campaign slogan and that of Herbert Hoover in 1932. Besides inviting the fair but unwanted comparison between the Bush and Hoover administrations, is "we've turned a corner and we're not turning back" really such a good slogan to begin with? It leads one to ask some questions that Bush might not want asked, such as "Why is there a corner to have been turned? Whose fault is that, anyway?" and "Have we really turned the corner at all?" and "If we've turned the corner are you sure we've turned the right way?" and "Even if we've turned the corner and headed the right way, why should we trust you that we're not going back?"

Kevin also encourages one to complete the sentence "George Bush is the first president since Herbert Hoover to _______." His winner so far, and I have to concur.

Made for the radio

So I watched the Kerry speech on Thursday and was initially not impressed. R. was alternately watching and napping and her reaction at the end of the speech was "He's going to lose." I wasn't so pessimistic, but I also thought that Kerry hadn't done enough to close the deal. But then yesterday morning I was listening to NPR on the way to work and their political commentators were raving about the speech. And they played bites from the speech that sounded really good. They sounded much better than I thought they did when I saw Kerry say them on TV. Even the "west wing" joke, which I thought was flat when Kerry made it, sounded funny when NPR replayed it. I still can't say that this was my reaction.

Well of course this is going to happen. Any excerpt is going to sound much better or worse than the speech as whole. But it could be that Kerry is also fifty years behind his time. He may be someone who sounds much better on the radio than he does in person. One of the things that irked me about the speech is that his gestures often didn't match his voice and you don't get that coming through on the radio. Kerry as FDR? I could live with that.

The other thing about this disconnect between my perception and the media perception is that it is the media's perception that matters. Only an estimated 20 million people watched the speech and if the media says it was a good speech then for the other 280 million people in this country it was a good speech

That explains the Carville thing

According to Mary Matalin, Dick Cheney is the thinking woman's version of sexy. I'm sorry, but I refuse to take her word for it. I'm going to have to get some independent confirmation on this one.

Actually, many of the thinking women I know have said that Bill Clinton is their idea of sexy. But maybe I just move in the wong circles. Perhaps there are flocks of women out there who are suckers for dishonest balding corpulent executives.