Thursday, November 8, 2012

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Rickie Lee Jones, 58.

Good stuff:

1. Must-read of the day: Alex Massie collects a bunch of junk from NRO that will be fun reading for those who enjoy that sort of thing, but if that's not you skip down to his excellent analysis of what ails the GOP. Key quote: "the answer to the GOP’s problems lies in policy."

2. Suzy Khimm on mandates.

3. Purple America (via the Monkey Cage).

4. Hans Noel isn't wrong about data presentation.

5. And I do believe I was joking around a while ago about aggregating the aggregators. Guess what? Brice Acree did it, and it worked really well. He's worried about what the critics will say if we have a proliferation of these in the next cycle; I'm just looking forward to linking to whoever aggregates the aggregator aggregators.

3 comments:

  1. I caught a clip from Rachel Maddow this weekend, where she showed a headline from the Toledo Blade that said "Marchionne says 'No Way' on China allegations". Maddow explained to viewers unfamiliar that Marchionne is Sergio Marchionne, CEO of Chrysler. Then she asked the damning hypothetical, which apparently no one in Team Romney was shmart enough to see:

    "How many other Fortune 500 CEOs are so integral to the Toledo community that the local paper refers to them without clarifiers?"

    Which paints a surreal picture in critical Ohio in the last weekend of the campaign: Stephanie Cutter and her happy tour of Obama greeters is out knocking on all her doors, while Team Romney is torpedoing Toledo because something something bad economy something something anti-incumbency.

    All due respect to the experts, it seems to me that Cutter's approach is the new normal, Republicans will eventually catch up (helped no doubt by the advent of e-voting), but in the meantime there will be some furious curve-fitting to make broad-themed political prediction models fit seemingly incongruous results.

    Because at the end of the day, I tell the pollsters I'm really decisive, because that's what the man in the mirror tells me (when he's not saying I'm teh awesome, of course), but the truth is, if you buy me dinner and a glass of wine to boot, while the other guy is threatening the demise of my beloved Toledo, I'm really actually fairly easy.

    The Republicans will learn. Eventually.

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  2. That Maddow piece was brilliant. It pointed up how the Romney campaign thought it could come into Ohio and tell the people of Toledo a bunch of stuff about Jeep and Chrysler that they didn't already know, when these people already live and die with the auto-industry news. It was as if they were trying to tell Jonathan what the Giants need to do in the off-season.

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  3. I just wanted to thank you for reminding me about the unique and wonderful Rickie Lee Jones, but . . .

    Lucas County, OH pretty much IS Toledo - my home town(!) It's the the farthest northwest blue Co. in this map.

    http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2012/results/ohio

    BHO by 64.3 to 33.9. Of the 16 counties BHO took of OH's 88, 9 were by 55 or more. Much closer in conservative Dayton and Cincinnati.

    OH really is the US in miniature - blue on the coast and in the metro areas, red where the people are outnumbered by deer or cattle.

    Seriously - get 10 miles out of one of the six major cities in any direction, and you might as well be in Alabama. Along the Indiana border, Romney numbers run even into the 70's.

    This country is terribly divided.

    JzB

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