The massive unpopularity of health care reform

Nate Silver of 538 takes a look at a recent poll done by the Kaiser Family Foundation claims that the health care bill is unpopular. The conclusion? That while while people react differently to the phrase "health care reform" or "Senate health care bill", when they are asked whether or not they are for or against specific provisions within the Senate health bill there is not only almost overwhelming support for those provisions, but the entire bill itself. The problem? With most provisions the public is only marginally aware that they are contained within the Senate bill.

Let's see. When told of specific provisions of the bill the public is broadly supportive and for the reforms under consideration. Numerous political experts are screaming that the only chance Democrats will have in November is for the House to pass the goddamn Senate bill. Numerous health care experts are screeching that for the betterment of the US health care system the House needs to pass the goddamn Senate bill. So what are Democrats going to do? Dick around, delay, and start over in an attempt to pass some watered down, lesser, piecemeal version of the Senate bill. Maybe. Maybe just give up.

Of course they are. "Health care reform" is "unpopular", legislating is haaaaard, and there is that 41-59 Republican majority to think about. Never underestimate the ability o Democrats to look at the facts and the political reality of a situation, choose to replace that reality with one of their own mental creation, and convince themselves that showing massive weakness and getting nothing done is the best way forward. Well done, Democrats. Well done.

Chart of the day

The New York Times gave the wonder triplet hive mind of 538.com the op-ed floor the other day. Of course they decided to devote their time to health care. Their findings? That the younger and poorer you are, the more likely you are to want reform. The other main finding? That the more likely a Senator of Representative is likely to drone on about their final decision coming down to what's best for the people in their district/state, the more likely they are to be full of shit and ignoring the wishes of the people in their district/state. No, what support or opposition seems to coalesce around is the relative popularity/'08 election vote totals that Obama received in said elected betters' state/district, regardless of voter's overall views on health reform.

Isn't that nice? That everything in DC, no matter how big or small, never comes down to whether or not it's the best plan or whether people want it, but the nakedest of political calculations....that end up being completely shortsighted and wrong when all is said and done. Thanks for renewing my faith in democracy, 538, you math obsessed happiness vampires.

Cheap Blogging Crutch 10.28

Fox-Friendly Poll on Imaginary White House Policies
From Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting comes a report of a dandy of a poll from Fox News and Zogby whereupon they ask the question if Americans think that Obama's communist diversity czar's imaginary desire to force out the "good white people" in the broadcast industry to make room for the blacks and the gays and the gay blacks represents a threat to free speech. Nothing like a little conspiratorial race bait push polling to start your day. Gee, I wonder why it is that the Obama Administration doesn't like Fox News?

Analysis: Public Option Is Likely Popular in Most Blue Dog Districts
Nate Silver of 538 works his number witchcraft to look at the popularity of the public option....in every single congressional district. The conclusion? That the public option has support in almost 2/3rds of all districts and in regards to the biggest Democratic gainsayers, the Blue Dog caucus, the public option holds majority support in 34 of 52 of their districts. The conclusion supposedly being that a public option should have more support of our elected betters. Ahh Nate, your cold robot logic has failed you again. Don't you know no one in Congress actually cares about what its constituents thinks? But we do appreciate you giving us yet another mathematically valid reason to hate everyone in Congress.

New York Fed’s Secret Choice to Pay for Swaps Hits Taxpayers
Pop quiz: how do you get AIG to look good? Answer: Make sure they're being compared to Tim Geithner. That's right our beloved Treasury Secretary Timmy demanded that the US government pay AIG 100 cents on the dollar for their utterly worthless credit default swaps when AIG was only seeking to get 40 cents on the dollar for them. This cost taxpayers and additional $13 billion dollars. The kicker? This allowed AIG to pay back the $14 billion it owed to Timbo's former employer Goldman-Sachs. Next time Tim, can you put on some cowboy gear, cover your face with a black bandanna, tell us "to reach for the sky", and make us pile the money into a burlap sack with a dollar sign on it? If we're going to get robbed, can we at least get to appreciate the theatre of it?

Losing Net Neutrality: The Worst Case Scenario
Gizmodo links to a half satirical/half terrifying representation of what kind of internet deal we'll be getting from cable companies if Congress votes to ditch net neutrality. Why wouldn't we want our internet priced out and divided up like cable channels, everyone loves how that works, don't they?

LHC Reawakens, Sending Proton Beams Running at the Speed of Light
Finally the scientific community gets off its lazy, goldbricking asses and starts trying to kill God in earnest again. They've fixed the helium leak, stopped the problem they've had with magnets overheating, scrapped plans to convert the LHC into a pussy magnet, and found that missing pallet of particles that idiot Jenkins misplaced. Hopefully within the next few months God will be dead or the French/Swiss border will find it has a new black hole taking up residence and consuming our solar system. Just get it over with, it's not like any of us have jobs or anything to live for.

Quote of the day

Philip Spooner, World War II vet, on the gay marriage debate currently going on in Maine.

I am here today because of a conversation I had last June when I was voting. A woman at my polling place asked me, "Do you believe in equal, equality for gay and lesbian people?" I was pretty surprised to be asked a question like that. It made no sense to me. Finally I asked her, "What do you think our boys fought for at Omaha Beach?" I haven't seen much, so much blood and guts, so much suffering, much sacrifice. For what? For freedom and equality. These are the values that give America a great nation, one worth dying for.

The quest to repeal gay marriage rights in Maine through the Question 1 ballot initiative is going to be voted on soon. And surprise of surprises the opposition to it is from the same groups that got Prop 8 passed in California. Numbers overlord Nate Silver of 538.com says the ban is likely to fail, but that it'll be close either way. I guess the question is do people in Maine hate freedom, liberty, veterans, World War II, the D-Day assault, the military, our victory against the Axis powers, and equality so much that they would overturn the rights of gays to marry and tacitly endorse Hitler's invasion into Poland and annexation of the Sudetenland? I guess we'll find out on November 3rd.

Cheap Blogging Crutch 09.23

Survey: One Quarter of Americans Could Claim 'No Religion' in 20 Years
Praise Jesus! People who don't believe in God/follow no "religious tradition" are the fastest growing segments of the US religious landscape. So that's a big thanks to you American religious right. I think those anti-science, anti-choice, pro-war, pro-death penalty, hypocritical, evangelical moralizing insanity you've decided to amp up to 11 over the years has convinced people that God is either dead or never existed. Don't worry, I didn't forget the molesting priests and church cover-ups. They helped too. Again, thanks.

Health Care Is Hazardous to Poll Numbers for Grassley, Other Senators
Who would have ever thought that nakedly shilling for insurance companies, not having an alternative plan to do anything about health care, and disseminating lies would ever come back to haunt Republicans? And who would have thought that dicking around, ignoring constituents, and going out of your way to compromise with people who weren't willing to compromise would alienate Democrats? This was all unforeseeable.

Palin Hong Kong Speech Blames Government For Financial Crisis; Some Walk Out In Disgust
Oh God, she went overseas to deliver a "major policy address". Doesn't this constitute a hostile act of aggression towards China? Ah well, least she hasn't seemed to learn anything, what with all this free time she has now. Not only did she blame the global economic collapse of government, instead of those pesky bankers and financial conglomerates, she said the solution was....wait for it...capital gains cuts and the removal of the estate tax! One other solution she offered: freedom. I really hope she does more of these "policy" speeches.

With G-20, Pittsburgh gets its 15 minutes
The LA Times tries to come to grips with the question all of us in Pittsburgh are asking: Why in the hell is the G-20 being held here? No one knows. No one will ever know. I just think it has something to do with President Obama and Dan Rooney practically becoming a couple. All I can say is that I hope the G20 summit can do for us what it did for Morelia, Mexico

Senate OK’s Kennedy successor bill
That's the Massachusetts we know and love: ready to drop trow and amend its laws in order to feed the democratic machine. Massachusetts could have a new interim senator and Democrats could have their 60th vote by as early as tomorrow. Some have been suggesting Dr. Atul Gawande. That sounds like a damn fine idea. Just as long as it isn't another damned Kennedy.

Broken News: Nate Silver predicts lottery numbers, promptly vanishes

NEW YORK--Statistician and journalist Nate Silver, who created the popular poll analysis website fivethirtyeight.com, disappeared almost immediately after successfully forecasting the winning numbers for the New York Mega Millions lottery. The jackpot was worth just over $294 million at the time of Silver's win.

Lottery officials are still trying to determine whether a complex algorithm capable of predicting both the proper date and numerical sequence upon which to wager constitutes a violation of state law.

"Frankly, we're at a loss" said New York State Lottery Commissioner Eliot Glassberg. "If he had tampered with the equipment or the staff, we'd already be arranging a bail hearing. But a remarkable instance of logical conjecture based on extrapolations from a battery of data going back decades? Kind of a gray area. In any event, he'll have to share the jackpot with a mechanic from Albany who won by picking numbers comprised of his Uncle Sully's birthday and the opening day lineup numbers of the Mets infield."

According to friends and family, the 31 year-old Silver, whose near-perfect electoral forecasts brought him national attention in 2008 after six years as a Managing Partner at Baseball Prospectus, gave no indication that he had concocted a method of winning hundreds of millions of dollars.

"These last couple of months, Nate had been spending a lot of time on something he called the 'CM Initiative'," said Silver's writing partner, poker player and political analyst Sean Quinn, who began writing for fivethirtyeight during the 2008 presidential race. "He played that pretty close to the vest, although Nate did eventually tell me that 'CM' stood for 'Cashey Money'."

Added Quinn, "He called me the other night and said he'd be taking some time off. Now that I think about it, he sounded a little drunk. I distinctly remember him saying something about sitting at a Vegas poker table until he was 'too drunk or too dead' to continue. Then maybe something about an island, and maybe a tangible universe of numbers and calculations which he presided over as if he were God? I can't be sure -- it was too hard to understand him through all of that maniacal laughter."

Another frequent contributor to fivethirtyeight, Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University, did not seem the least bit surprised by Silver's sudden disappearance.

"Look, in this city, brains like Nate's will probably have you pulling steady 7.5-8 caliber tail. But brains and nine-figure money? Let's just say that if you're looking for Nate, I would start the search in Tensville."

A search of Silver's apartment turned up little. Apart from an extensive library, several custom-built computers, a 216-digit number that contained the true name of God, and likely the largest collection of newspaper box scores ever assembled, investigators found only a hand-written note stating the following:

"I have calculated the odds of a complete and irrevocable collapse of the global economy, and of civilization as we know it, at 3:2. Good luck."

In a haunting coda, the note then asked that the detective reading it to "...please fix your striped blue tie, get those size 10 Rockford boots off the front right corner of my coffee table, stop thinking about the ass of that girl behind the counter at the corner store, and call your wife Shelia about dinner with the Califaros tonight, because there's been a problem. I know all."

As of this writing, said detective is being counseled for mental anguish resulting from the brutal shattering of his notions of causality and fate, as well as the violation of what he had considered private thoughts.

Lottery officials confirmed that Silver had accepted his half of the one-time payout option, worth approximately $76 million after taxes, in the form of a cashier's check.

Chart of the Day

From 538.com (they aren't dead), comes this look at how whitey voted in the 2008 election compared to the rest of the populace. Conclusion? Grampa Walnuts would have had it wrapped up if it weren't for those damned meddling non-whites and the unmoneyed underclasses. At least he can take solace in his superior NCAA bracketology.

Nate Silver brings the math

With Coleman's margin cut to 180 votes and most, if not all, of the Franken heavy areas of the state to come in, some would say that Al has a pretty good chance of locking this big damn race up. Those people are amateur guesswankers, flogging their limp notions in shame. Nate Silver, he of 538.com and a man who personally has more book deals than you've had hot meals, has decided to end all debate with math. Maths + English. Nate ran the numbers, created some math algorithms, and punched those numbers, plus/minus signs, fractions, an cosines into his computron and popped out a number: 27 votes.

franken_net = t * 8.922 - 3.622

Now, we can attempt to solve this equation at the statewide level. When we plug in a t of .499956 -- Franken was picked on just slightly very less than half of the ballots during the initial count -- we get a value for franken_net of .837. That is, Franken will gain a net of .837 votes for every 10,000 cast. With a total of 2,885,555 ballots having been recorded in the initial count, this works out to a projected gain of 242 votes for Franken statewide. Since Norm Coleman led by 215 votes in the initial count, this suggests that Franken will win by 27 votes once the recount process is complete (including specifically the adjudication of all challenged ballots).

Of course he says, it's all subject to blah blah blah and might not be accurate blah blah, but the man has charts and equations. It's over. Franken wins by 27. Nate Silver is the math Gandalf.

And if Franken does win by 27, I'm burning Nate Silver as a witch. Fair warning.

If if if...

Via 538, Andrew Gelman gives us the rosiest news we can really expect anytime soon, in reference to Virginia and Indiana, where them thar polls close early:

If those states go roughly as expected (meaning, say, an Obama win in Virginia and a close race in Indiana), we can conclude with almost literal 100 percent certainty that Obama will win the election...

Tuned. Stay.

Exit polls: Hitler and the Devil rolled into one

Ahh exit polls, the thing that get Democrat hearts aflutter, before horrible reality comes in and throws gasoline on your hopes and sets the bastard alight. They were wrong about Gore (missed a crucial 5 votes on Maryland Ave in Washington DC) and Kerry (landslide!), and Karl Rove got to rub his festering sack on your head those two nights when the networks released them early, convinced you the world was just and good, then yanked your seat out from under you and laughed as you fell when the real numbers came in. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight has a list (and multiple paragraphs) of reasons to ignore them this time.

1. Exit polls have a much larger intrinsic margin for error than regular polls.
2. Exit polls have consistently overstated the Democratic share of the vote.
3. Exit polls were particularly bad in this year's primaries.
4. Exit polls challenge the definition of a random sample.
5. Democrats may be more likely to participate in exit polls.
6. Exit polls may have problems calibrating results from early voting.
7. Exit polls may also miss late voters.
8. "Leaked" exit poll results may not be the genuine article.
9. A high-turnout election may make demographic weighting difficult.
10. You'll know the actual results soon enough anyway.

Also, exit polls sneak into your room when you pass out and draw dicks and balls on your face, exit polls hid the truth about the contaminated water in the local reservoir, exit polls don't pay no child support on all its kids, and exit polls helped hide Eichmann in Argentina. So when they get leaked early, don't start the celebratory drinking or the victory dance you choreographed, just stay calm. Take note of them, ignore them, and continue on with the normal midday drinking you do. You'll know soon enough.

The punditocracy prognosticate

On the Huffington Post, their net apes collected a relatively impressive banana pile of political insiders, conventional wisdom molesters, and election guesstimators who have divined the results of tomorrow's National Day of McCain Shaming. Mark Halperin, Matthew Dowd, Donna Brazile, George Will, George Stephanopoulos, Chris Matthews, Nate Silver, Chris Cilizza, Ariana Huffington, Elanor Clift, Markos Moulitas, Ed Rollins, Paul Begala, my mortal enemy James Carville, Charles Mahtesian, Morton Kondracke, David Plotz, Alex Castellanos, Dan Gerstein, Tom Doherty, Robert Y. Shapiro, Robert Erickson, and Alan Abramowitz all picking McCain to win. Just shitting you, they all picked Obama by a measure of around 318-378 electoral votes, with democrats picking up around 8 Senate seats and 25 House seats. Way to go out on a limb my dear gentlefops and courtesans.

One man was so drugged out of his mind he decided to weave his own narrative and poll numbers out of his hallucinations, freebasing pure freedom to show him the route for a McCain victory. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard rejects your reality and substitutes his own, foreseeing a McCain 286-252 victory and lesser gains for Democrats in Congress. Is he just an insane old man with an inability to deal with the impending Obama States of America, or is the rest of the conventional, boot licking media, the same ones who couldn't see 10 minutes ahead, get it wrong again?

538 votes insane old man. Essentially for McCain to win every poll from multiple and varied polling organizations in multiple states would have to be drastically wrong on an unprecedented scale never before seen in mathematics or humankind. To think McCain has got it in the bag right now is to imagine hordes of cartoons, dwarves, Jedi, and winged unicorns tipping the tide for him tomorrow, negating the elf, Muppet, and sentient sandwich vote. ACORN didn't register enough of them. There's always good old fashioned election theft via electronic voting machines. There is that. So take some measure of relief, it should be a waltz. You haven't calmed down have you? Still breathing into a paper bag over the Pennsylvania I? Fine, IT'S ALL GOING TITS UP! MCCAIN WILL WIN! FOREVER DARKNESS! GOBLIN HORDES! FOUR MORE YEARS!

Boo.

Psst... Hey, want to see what a McCain win looks like? Go below the fold. First one is free.



Calm down. Nate Silver did this just to fuck with you. This scenario has only occurred 169 times out of every 10,000 simulations run earlier today. Go to bed.

Then wake up tomorrow and give Al Franken some money.