“I’m a Runner” - Sarah Palin edition

This time it’s actually an interview from Runner’s World. Andrew Sullivan seems to think there’s a lie somewhere in her account of a fall while running on the McCain ranch. I don’t really see what he thinks the issue is there. I do think it’s interesting to note that she blames the McCain staff for not letting her run enough:

Palin: A great frustration I had during the campaign was when the McCain staff wouldn’t carve out time for me to go for a run. The days never went as well if I couldn’t get out there and sweat.

Q: Did you raise that issue, and put the ultimatum down that you needed to run?

Palin: Absolutely, and they would say, “Yes, in a couple of days we’re going to start carving out that half-hour or hour to run,” and too often it never happened, and that was frustrating.

The infighting continues.

Ok, ok, I’ll write a post about Michael Jackson

When I was a kid, like everyone else, I was a fan. Not a huge fan, but enough of a fan that I ought to apologize to my mom for insisting that we listen to “Thriller” so many times while driving in our car that any normal adult would have gone mad. My friend Bill somehow got a tape of the video and we loaded it into his parents’ huge, clunky VCR and played it over and over again.

At some point the weirdness took over and I wasn’t able to hear “Thriller” or “Beat It” or “The Girl is Mine” without being soured by the bizarre details of this guy’s life. By singing along to “Billie Jean” was I tacitly approving of a man who had sleepovers with young boys and dangled toddlers off balconies? It’s been years since I could really enjoy the music. Maybe this is why you don’t hear much Michael Jackson on the typical 1980s nostalgia radio stations.

Anyway, since Thursday, the joy is back. I’ve watched a few of the old videos on YouTube, and it’s fun to experience them for themselves again. It’s the way people must feel when an Alzheimer’s sufferer dies and relatives can finally revert to the memories of that person as she was in her prime. And by thinking of Jackson in that way again, I feel a little closer to my childhood than I did a week ago.

The Real Surprise at the Court today

The Court’s most unexpected move was to order the September reargument of the Citizens United v. FEC case. The justices invite lawyers to address the issue of whether the Court ought to overrule its very recent ruling (McConnell v. FEC) that upheld the “electioneering communication” provisions of the McCain-Feingold act, as well as a 1990 ruling pertaining to corporate independent expenditures.

The “electioneering communication” issue is a very important free speech matter, and it looks like the Court (in contrast to its recent Voting Rights Act decision) may be preparing to address it directly. The case at hand has to do with the airing of an anti-Hillary Clinton movie in the time around an election. McCain-Feingold says electoral ads are banned around election time unless they’re funded by the proper sources (that is, money raised via regulated and reported procedures and channels).

The cop-out way to decide this case might be to define “Hillary the Movie” out of the regulated category: It’s not an ad, it’s a “documentary”, so it doesn’t fall under the McCain-Feingold rules. (This is a stretch, but it was also a stretch to avoid the constitutional issue in the VRA case.)  But at least some of the justices must want to consider the uncomfortable move of overruling a very recent (2003) precedent, or they wouldn’t have ordered the reargument.

“I’m a Runner” — Mark Sanford Edition

The whole situation is pretty sad. But leave it to Politico to relay speculation that his reclusive lone-wolf ways are related to his being a “long distance marathon runner.” Just like ROD BLAGOJEVICH!

Hmm.

New Nixon tapes released!

From the LA Times:

Nixon’s voice in the tapes is often a mumble with an occasional burst of profanity breaking through.

Context on Sanford

Governing magazine had a good article last year on the South Carolina governorship, which is perhaps the weakest in the country. It’s weak because the 1895 constitution was largely written by segregationist “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman:

The primary goal of that constitution was to guarantee that nobody but a white man would ever be elected governor. But the authors, in the throes of racial paranoia, went further. They divided executive power in a whole series of complex ways just to make sure that, if there ever was a black governor, he couldn’t do anything. That’s why South Carolina has nine separately elected constitutional officers, and why boards and commissions, not the governor, cast the decisive votes when it comes to running the executive agencies.

So maybe Sanford’s absence didn’t have much impact on the state’s operations after all.

There’s no politics like state politics

The New York Times has a pretty decent roundup of state budget crisis news, as most states careen towards the July 1 start of the next fiscal year. Meanwhile, in light of the California mess, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has evidently done the wise thing and declined to run for governor. The State Senate in New York appears no closer to resolving a power struggle, even as Governor Patterson calls them into special session. And in a bizarre move, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who was recently thwarted in a bid to reject federal stimulus funds, disappeared for four days. It’s unclear who, if anyone, was running the state while Sanford was missing.

It’s to be expected that in a situation of great fiscal stress, problems and tensions that are glossed over in the fat years would break out into the open. On the other hand, perhaps it’s time for a systematic and non-partisan nationwide evaluation of state government performance, along the lines of the study of state legislatures undertaken by the Citizens Conference on State Legislatures in the early 1970s.

Latest from Mebane on the Iran election

Expert vote fraud analyst Walter Mebane of the University of Michigan now has data that “give moderately strong support for a diagnosis that the 2009 election was affected by significant fraud.” (PDF, see p. 9.)

Better Data, More Sophisticated Analysis

Walter Mebane at the University of Michigan is one of the best authorities anywhere on the statistical analysis of electoral fraud. He’s produced a quick analysis of the Iran election results (PDF). Interestingly, his analysis of town-level data (which is measured at a finer level of aggregation than Silver’s province-level data) shows that there’s actually a pretty close relationship between Ahmedinejad’s 2005 and 2009 vote proportions:

In general, combining the 2005 and 2009 data conveys the impression that a substantial core of the 2009 results reflected natural political processes. In 2009 Ahmadinejad tended to do best in towns where his support in 2005 was highest, and he tended to do worst in towns where turnout surged the most.

On the other hand, there’s a curious pattern of outliers in the 2009 data that does not appear to be typical of election results — either in general or in the particular case of Iran in 2005.

Finally, for the truly geeky among us, it’s worth taking a look at Mebane’s work on detecting fraud through a clever use of Benford’s Law. This doesn’t pay off in the Iran case (the data are too highly aggregated), but it’s a pretty neat idea.

Meanwhile, in Albany…

State judge Thomas McNamara just did the prudent thing and dismissed the court case in the squabble over the state senate leadership. At this point they’re tied 31-31, without a lieutenant governor to break the tie. A power-sharing agreement might be negotiated, but they’re scheduled to finish the session in less than a week. I think this is the kind of thing that the above “facepalm” meme was invented for.

One counterexample

OK, as I’ve said in my last posts here and here, most elections follow predictable localized patterns. Districts that voted more heavily for a particular candidate or party in one year tend to vote for that candidate or party more heavily in other years. In the U.S., these patterns persist not only from election to election, but for decades. In my first post, however, I did point out that demographic or political changes of massive proportions could shake this pattern up. Here’s a good example of how this has happened in this country: New Orleans. (more…)

More on the Iran election point

This is perhaps overkill, but here are a few more illustrations of the phenomenon I was pointing out below. (more…)

More on Iran

To reinforce the point Vshawnt makes below, here’s an illustration of how well Bush’s 2000 vote percentage by state predicts his 2004 vote percentage by state. (The very low percentage case is DC, in case you’re wondering.) The R-squared here is  .96, meaning that 96 percent of the variation in the 2004 percentages can be explained by the 2000 percentages. Compare that with Silver’s R-squareds of between .10 and .22.

Update: Just ran a few more of these for kicks, and the R-squared for a regression of 2004 Bush vote by state on Reagan’s 1980 vote by state is .66. So there’s a high degree of correlation between elections nearly a quarter-century apart. This is American politics rather than Iranian politics, but it’s implausible to me that provincial support for Ahmadinejad would change so radically in Iran absent a big shift in population and/or a dramatic political realignment.

New York Senate Mess in Context

The bizarre power struggle in Albany continues. Looks like a judge is giving the parties the weekend to iron things out, and on Monday we’ll either have a deal, or a court ruling.

Interestingly enough, the case of defecting party members swinging the chamber majority to the other party is actually not all that uncommon, especially (obviously) in situations in which the chamber is close to evenly divided. In the mid-1990s, California’s Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, a Democrat, worked out a deal with a few Republicans to remain in charge, even with a Republican majority. Something similar happened in Virginia in the late 1990s. And just this year, Tennessee State House Democrats colluded with a renegade Republican to elect a speaker that Republicans opposed.

What is unusual is that this has happened at this point in the session. Usually deals get worked out in the organizational stages of a legislative session — in December or January — and then stick. In New York’s case, a deal *was* worked out in December, but came unstuck this week for some reason.  To provide a bit of perspective on the situation, check out the views of these political scientists, a smart bunch indeed.

Stalling for Time

That’s what the Democrats appear to be doing in New York. Shutting off the lights didn’t work, so now it’s locking the chambers and suing to stop the Republicans from taking over. It’s all so silly that it must just be a delaying tactic to allow them to regroup and deploy their real strategy, right?

Meanwhile, the Republican “reform” caucus appears set to meet this afternoon, whether or not they get into the Senate chamber. One thing’s for sure: Governor Paterson is “not going to go knock down the doors of the Senate and open them up.“

Democrats overthrown in Albany

New York state politics have been nothing but captivating this year. Yesterday’s bombshell was the overthrow of Democrats’ slim majority in the State Senate after two renegade NYC Dems, Pedro Espada Jr. and Hiram Monserrate, threw their hats in with the Republicans. A few brief reactions:

1) As Eric Kleefeld at TPM puts it, this was more about (former) Democratic Majority Leader Malcolm Smith’s failure to placate pivotal Democrats with special favors than it was about any larger issue. Espada and Monserrate (along with two other Democrats) nearly prevented Smith from taking control way back in December. Why they weren’t lavished with special benefits after that, I do not understand.

2)  Sheldon Silver (Democratic Speaker of the Assembly) is a big winner. He’s the only person in Albany who seems firmly in charge of his domain. Smith and Governor Paterson were taken by complete surprise, and their blustering protestations only make them look weaker.

3) Gay marriage in New York, more or less dead for this session anyway, is particularly dead now.

4)  On a more speculative note, could this herald a weakening of the “three men in a room” model of leadership in Albany? Along with changing the leadership, Republicans have promised to decentralize Senate decision-making and to equalize resources available to members. There’s some justifiable skepticism of this, but time will tell.

Sotomayor

Does Sotomayor’s reaction to well-wishers’ advice that she “break a leg” suggest that she will take an overly literal view of Constitutional law?

No-News Monday from the New York Times

Today’s articles that aren’t really news include: Abortion protesters are not sure what to protest next, now that the guy they were protesting is dead; health care might be bipartisan, but might not, and might hinge on the top Senators on the Finance Committee, or might not; and Larry Summers is a jerk.

Growing strains on higher education

The auto companies and financial institutions get all the attention these days, but there’s also trouble on the horizon in my industry: higher education. The nature of the problem differs depending on the type of institution, but almost all kinds of schools are feeling the strain. (more…)

BREAKING! Vicious Lake Monster Sighted in Vermont!

Up here in the north country, the big news is that over the weekend a Burlington resident captured a 2-minute video of the legendary “Champ,” our region’s version of the Loch Ness Monster. Speculation about the creature’s nature and motives abound, but can it be a coincidence that the same week the beast appeared, GM went bankrupt AND we get the first Osama bin Laden audio tape in many months? Just sayin’.

Developing….

Public Opinion on Abortion is Stable

(click to view)

Gallup published a poll to much fanfare this week declaring that the number of people who are “pro-life” now exceeds the number of people who are “pro-choice.” I’m skeptical of this claim because of the wording of the poll. The Gallup poll asks: “With respect to the abortion issue, would you consider yourself to be pro-choice or pro-life?” Gallup finds that 51 percent of people say “pro-life”, while only 42 percent say “pro-choice”.

As most political scientists have long known, though, it’s much more accurate to ask people not whether they identify with these terms, but under what circumstances they believe abortion ought to be permitted. The public typically takes a moderate middle ground, even on this, a very contentious, polarizing issue.  The graph above is my representation of results from the National Election Studies surveys going back to 1980. The NES asks the question this way:

There has been some discussion about abortion during recent years. Which one of the opinions on this page best agrees with your view?

1. By law, abortion should never be permitted.
2. The law should permit abortion only in case of rape, incest, or when the woman’s life is in danger.
3. The law should permit abortion for reasons other than rape, incest, or danger to the woman’s life, but only after the need for the abortion has been clearly established.
4. By law, a woman should always be able to obtain an abortion as a matter of personal choice.

When you ask the question this way, opinion on abortion has been remarkably stable for almost 30 years, and things haven’t changed much recently.

Obama to California: Drop Dead

Well, not really. But the administration is reluctant to bail the state out. As it should be.

California

California voters rejected all but one of six ballot measures designed to fill budget gaps under a deal between Governor Schwarzenegger and pivotal legislators earlier this year. Without the new revenue and borrowing from these measures, the state is right back to being in the crisis situation it was in back in February. Now state leaders have to figure out where to get $21.3 billion dollars, and they have to do it fast. Bankruptcy seems unthinkable, but then again it was unthinkable for GM and Chrysler not too long ago.

In this case, failure has many fathers. It actually might be overdetermined. Chief culprits include: California’s longstanding constitutional provision requiring a 2/3 majority of the legislature to pass the budget; Proposition 13 (1978), which requires a 2/3 majority of the legislature to raise state taxes; Proposition 140 (1990), which imposed a system of term limits that make it less likely that anybody in state government will take a long-run perspective; political party polarization, which makes it likely that at least 1/3 +1 of the state legislature will oppose whatever budget or tax proposals the majority supports; the cartoonish “debate” over illegal immigration, which encourages voters to blame all the state’s problems on somebody else; and of course, the usual bevy of opportunistic politicians who exploit all of the above.

Governor Schwarzenegger is proposing to address (some of) the budget problems by (further) gutting education, (further) preying upon the resources of local governments, and releasing and transferring tens of thousands of prisoners. In an ironic twist, some of the cuts may make California ineligible for some federal stimulus money.  But these cuts won’t prevent California from suffering similar crises next year and the year after that. I’m wary of a literal bankruptcy because of the draconian harm that might result, but I’d support the political equivalent: a constitutional convention that might untie the hands of the state’s leaders and finally allow them to address California’s entrenched dysfunction.

Pelosi and the CIA

I don’t believe either one of them.

100-some-odd Days

We here at Back Alley Media missed the artificial “100 days” benchmark for evaluating a new president, but since it was artificial, it makes just as much sense for us to talk today about the administration’s record. I say Obama’s been extremely successful so far. This is based on the most straightforward measure of success that we’ve got, which is the extent to which Congress is giving him what he wants. He’s signed a new equal pay law, a CHIP extension, national service legislation, and — of course — a $787 billion stimulus bill. The fact that this bill was smaller than the original House legislation should take nothing away from this victory. After all, George W. Bush’s 2001 tax cut, obviously a success from Bush’s perspective, was $250 billion smaller than his administration originally proposed.

But there are some caveats.

(more…)