This is a interesting article on how data mining helped Obama win the election: Obama Wins: How Chicago’s Data-Driven Campaign Triumphed
The Republicans can rejoice in anti-science and anti-fact but scientific facts heped the Democrats win the election.
(thanks/via: TIME.com)
Republican pessimism is more than a PR headache. Put simply, it is hard for a party to win national elections in a country that it seems to dislike. Mr Romney’s campaign slogan was “Believe in America”. But too many on his side believe in a version of America from which displeasing facts or arguments are ruthlessly excluded. Todd Akin did not implode as a Senate candidate because of his stern opposition to abortion even in cases of rape or incest: many Republicans in Congress share those views. His downfall came because in trying to deny that his principles involved a trade-off with compassion for rape victims he came up with the unscientific myth that the bodies of women subjected to rape can shut down a pregnancy.
It was a telling moment of denial, much like the comforting myth that there is no such thing as climate change or, if there is, that humans are not involved. Ensconced in a parallel world of conservative news sources and conservative arguments, all manner of comforting alternative visions of reality surfaced during the 2012 election. Many, like Mr Akin’s outburst, involved avoiding having to think about unwelcome things (often basic science or economics). It became a nostrum among rank-and-file Republicans that mainstream opinion polls are biased and should be ignored, for instance, and that voter fraud is rampant and explains much of the Democrats’ inner-city support. Both conspiracies sounded a lot like ways of wishing the other side away.
Thoughtful Republicans are not oblivious to the dangers that they face. Optimists hope that new leaders will emerge to lead their movement rapidly towards greater realism, and greater cheeriness. If not, electoral defeats far more severe than those inflicted this time will surely impose such changes. Republicans may look back and wish the reckoning had started sooner. (source: Lexington: State of denial from The Economist)
Definitely read the whole article.
Tuesday’s elections produced some big winners — and some really big losers — whose names never appeared on any ballot. After outside groups spent more than $1.3 billion in independent expenditures to influence the outcome of the election, we now get to see just what all that money bought them — or didn’t.
Turns out some of the smart money wasn’t so smart after all when it came to making political bets. This year, the pro-business GOP Crossroads fundraising combine and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce weren’t as good at picking winners as the labor movement, which appears to be one of the surprise winners of Election Day.
Using Follow the Unlimited Money, Sunlight calculated returns on investment for the outside groups that gave the most during this year’s general election campaign. This includes super PACs, non-profit organizations and political party committees.
Some of the findings:
AMERICAN CROSSROADS
- 1.29% of $103,559,672 spent in the general election and ended in the desired result.
CROSSROADS GRASSROOTS POLICY STRATEGIES
- 14.40% of $70,710,008 spent in the general election and ended in the desired result.
US CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
- 6.90% of $31,937,037 spent in the general election and ended in the desired result.
FREEDOMWORKS FOR AMERICA
- 24.51% of $16,674,305 spent in the general election and ended in the desired result.
NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA POLITICAL VICTORY FUND
- 0.81% of $10,955,688 spent in the general election and ended in the desired result.
WOMEN VOTE!
- 73.16% of $6,072,693 spent in the general election and ended in the desired result.
Planned Parenthood Action Fund Inc.
- 97.82% of $5,141,216 spent in the general election and ended in the desired result.
There is a lot more, so check it out.
(thanks/via: sarahlee310)
Conservatives were at an information disadvantage because so many right-leaning outlets wasted time on stories the rest of America dismissed as nonsense. WorldNetDaily brought you birtherism.Forbes brought you Kenyan anti-colonialism. National Review obsessed about an imaginary rejection of American exceptionalism, misrepresenting an Obama quote in the process, and Andy McCarthy was interviewed widely about his theory that Obama, aka the Drone Warrior in Chief, allied himself with our Islamist enemies in a “Grand Jihad” against America. Seriously?
Conservatives were at a disadvantage because their information elites pandered in the most cynical, self-defeating ways, treating would-be candidates like Sarah Palin and Herman Cain as if they were plausible presidents rather than national jokes who’d lose worse than George McGovern.
How many months were wasted on them?
How many hours of Glenn Beck conspiracy theories did Fox News broadcast to its viewers? How many hours of transparently mindless Sean Hannity content is still broadcast daily? Why don’t Americans trust Republicans on foreign policy as they once did? In part because conservatism hasn’t grappled with the foreign-policy failures of George W. Bush. A conspiracy of silence surrounds the subject. Romney could neither run on the man’s record nor repudiate it. The most damaging Romney gaffe of the campaign, where he talked about how the 47 percent of Americans who pay no income taxes are a lost cause for Republicans? Either he was unaware that many of those people are Republican voters, or was pandering to GOP donors who are misinformed. Either way, bad information within the conservative movement was to blame.
Source: How Conservative Media Lost to the MSM and Failed the Rank and File from The Atlantic
Nate Silver was right. His ideological antagonists were wrong. And that’s just the beginning of the right’s self-created information disadvantage.
This article is really worth reading. It examines why the Republican media called the election so wrong.
My opinion: How long will anti-intelligence, anti-fact, anti-science appeal to conservatives? How can they continue to believe that if they say it, if they report falsehoods they become fact? It doesn’t become fact. It doesn’t make Obama a socialist just because the conservative press repeatedly report he is a socialist. It doesn’t make Obama’s birth certificate false when they report that non-fact endlessly. It doesn’t make concepts like incest so rare, women fabricate rape, that rape is something god intended to happen suddenly to become truth when they play these repulsive ideas ad nauseam. It doesn’t make scientists suddenly question the facts of global warming when the conservative press suggest the facts are in question. It just makes the press look foolish. It makes their candidates unelectable. Anti-fact (really it was simply a lie) worked when Bush convinced the world that Iraq had WMD but now we fact check everything we read.
More discoveries the Republicans might gain from this election on The Week.
Nervous wrecks by Bob Englehart
(thanks/via: 2012 Elections Political and Editorial Cartoons from The Week)
The President and First Lady returned to Iowa, where it all began in the winter of 2007.
The President told voters it’s time to finish what we’ve started, and make sure that no matter who you are, where you come from, or how you started out, this is the country where you can make it if you try.President Obama’s Full Speech from His Final Rally - Des Moines, Iowa (by BarackObamadotcom)
(one more BIG thanks/via: sarahlee310)
Read the whole column at: Romney: Elect Me Or House GOP Will Wreck The Economy
So ironic!
(thanks/via: TPM)
The 100th Day of the Romney Administration (by BarackObamadotcom)
If you still don’t know who to vote for maybe it will help to imagine what things will be like if Romney wins. This is a fictitious newscast for the 100th day of a Romney administration.
“Yes We Plan” - Mary J. Blige, Julianne Moore, & Q-Tip Speak Out With Planned Parenthood Action Fund (by PPVotes)
(thanks/via: sarahlee310)
Not sure it matters if global warming caused this storm. I could be wrong here but, we know that, 1) the temperature of the earth is rising, 2) this rise in temperature is causing ice cap melt, 3) increased ice cap melt is raising water levels, 4) when anomaly storms hit they hit harder in coastal areas at or below water level.
Here’s my question then. Why WOULDN’T we want to talk seriously about reducing our impact on rising temperatures?
(thanks/via: Huffington Post)
Who Will Do More? (by mittromney)
Wow Mitt seems willing to use any fabrication to get to the White House evidenced by this ad his campaign is running in Ohio. This is what Bloomberg REALLY reported:
The Romney ad is also contradicting an assertion from the company: “Let’s set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China,” the company said in an Oct. 25 statement on its website.
And more from Gaulberto Ranieri, a senior vice president for corporate communications at Chrysler:
“A careful and unbiased reading of the Bloomberg take would have saved unnecessary fantasies and extravagant comments.”
Read what Robert Reich has called “Romney’s Latest Lie.”
This reminds me of a president who used misinformation to lead us into war in Iraq (Mother Jones has assembled a highly informative interactive timeline about that sad debacle).
UPDATE: This story is really heating up in the press. There are dozens of articles about this issue but it is revealing that the Detroit Free Press quotes a GM spokesman, Greg Martin:
“No amount of campaign politics at its cynical worst will diminish our record of creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country.”
The Obama campaign has released this ad on the subject.
(thanks/via: Bloomberg and Mother Jones and Detroit Free Press)
ROMNEY: Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what we should cut — we should ask ourselves the opposite question. What should we keep? We should take all of what we’re doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we’re doing that we don’t have to do? And those things we’ve got to stop doing….
CNN’s JOHN KING: Including disaster relief, though?
ROMNEY: We cannot — we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all.
—Mitt Romney in 2011: ‘We Cannot Afford’ Federal Disaster Relief
(thanks/via: The Atlantic)
Whedon On Romney
(by WhedonOnRomney)
If you have not already seen this video you need stop everything you are doing and watch it now.
Joss Whedon is the creator/writer/director of many films and TV shows including Firefly & The Avengers.
(thanks/via: Huffington Post)
Paul Krugman wrote about Nate Silver’s projections and worried over the right’s attacks on fact, logic, science today:
Brad DeLong points me to this National Review attack on Nate Silver, which I think of as illustrating an important aspect of what’s really happening in America….
….This is, of course, reminiscent of the attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics — not to mention the attacks on climate science and much more. On the right, apparently, there is no such thing as an objective calculation. Everything must have a political motive.
This is really scary. It means that if these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign. (source)
(thanks/via: Paul Krubman and NY Times)
Don’t know Nate Silver? (Wiki on Nate here). Want to know what the weird word sabermatrician means?
