There is always a lot more that I want to write about than I have time for. For the last day or two, I’ve been wanting to write about this rumor that Obama is going to appoint John Kerry as Secretary of Defense. If this is true, I am really worried about President Obama. It seemed that after the debt ceiling debacle, he learned that politics is a game that requires strategy. This could prove that he learned nothing.

Look, this is simple. In 2014, there will be 20 Democratic Senators and only 13 Republican Senators up for re-election. The Republicans have a very good chance of taking the Senate back in 2014. So the Democrats don’t want to lose even a single seat in the Senate. If Kerry steps down, that seat could easily go Republican. And I think you know the Republican I’m talking about: that great defended of Indian rights, Scott Brown.

I understand. If you are really bad at playing the game of politics, you might think, “The Democrats won’t lose control of the Senate if they lose one seat.” And this is true. But this is one more seat that the Democrats will have to hold in 2014. It doesn’t make sense to make a hard election even harder.

Some will say that I am underestimating the President. They will use the 9-dimensional chess argument. They will claim that he knows what he’s doing. But when people have made these claims in the past, they’ve been wrong. And even if the Democrats manage to hold onto Kerry’s senate seat, it will still have been a dangerous move.

Take one for the team, Senator Kerry: remain a lowly United States Senator!

Regular reader and sometimes writer Mack brought my attention to a PBS documentary, Independent Lens Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream. It is about the two ends of Park Avenue: the part in the Upper West Side and the part in Harlem. It is a way of looking at income inequality in a very concrete way. It is a nice addition to Winner-Take-All Politics—coauthor Jacob Hacker is even interviewed in it. (See my article on the book.)

What most struck me in the film was a study that social psychologist Paul Piff did with the game of Monopoly. Instead of giving players an equal start, he defined players as either rich or poor. The rich player received three times the usual starting cash. The poor player received half the usual starting cash, got half as much money for passing go, and had to roll one die instead of the usual two. Obviously, the poor player lost—and quickly. But what is interesting is that the designated rich players developed a sense of entitlement. They demanded their wages and seemed to feel large amounts of schadenfreude.

This is all very interesting, but I think the more important lesson we can learn from the game is something that Piff mentioned in the interview:

Here’s the thing: you have, as the Republicans like to say, “Equality of opportunity.” You get to roll the dice. You are as likely to land on Chance as anyone else. You too get $200 when you pass go. What’s the problem?!

The problem is that you have no money and you would have no current opportunity to buy any property even if you had money. True equality would be if all the properties were unowned and everyone had the same amount of money—with the Monopoly economy or the real one. But check it out: you could still win. If you were ridiculously lucky—way more than “spade royal flush” lucky—you could win. And if enough people play enough games of Monopoly, eventually a poor player will win. Just like some small percentage of people in the real economy who grow up in poverty but go on to be hedge fund managers.

And that’s what’s so frustrating talking to conservatives who throw up the occasional exceptional success as proof that there really is “equality of opportunity.” I think this Monopoly example really clarifies the issue. And I plan to use it a lot in the future.

Otherwise, Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream is a good documentary on income inequality. It’s well worth watching, even if you already know all about income inequality. And I’m going to make it easy on you. Here it is:

I just watched two documentaries about ventriloquism. The first, Dumbstruck, is about amateurs and the normal professionals. One of those normal professionals, Terry Fator, went from unknown to winning America’s Got Talent and becoming one of the highest paid comedians in history during the course of the film. On the other end of the scale is a 13 year old boy, Dylan Burdette, who dreams of being a professional ventriloquist. There is also Wilma Swartz, a 6’5″ tall woman who does a lot of charity work with her puppets. And Kim Yeager, a former beauty queen who does hundreds of gigs at schools every year.

One thing that really stuck out to me in this film was what dicks many of the family members were. Swartz’s siblings have disowned her, at least partly because of the puppets (she is otherwise quite eccentric). Burdette’s father is very concerned that his son plays with dolls and is short. (Burdette has since grown taller than his father but he still plays with dolls.) Yeager’s mother never seems to say anything other than that her daughter ought to give up the dolls and have babies with the first man who passes by. (Yeager has since married.) And Terry Fator’s father wouldnn’t even show up to one of his gigs after Fator signed a $100 million 5 year contract with The Mirage.

The most impressive of the ventriloquist featured in Dumbstruck was Dan Horn. But before I tell you about him: his wife of 25 years left him during the making of the film. (Andrea claims this is because he’s gay. But he’s not gay; he’s a ventriloquist; there’s a difference.) Anyway… I’m not that fond of ventriloquism. What I love is puppetry. And Horn is as good a puppeteer as I have ever seen. His characters come alive in ways that frankly I’ve never seen with a ventriloquist. Here his is back in 1988, although I think he is better now:

I liked Dumbstruck more than the other movies, because I liked seeing the real world of ventriloquism. Most people, however, would prefer the second film, I’m No Dummy. It is more the view of ventriloquism from the perspective of the stars. It does a good job of providing a history of the last century of the art form. There are also interviews with historians and a museum curator. Plus there is lots of old footage of Paul Winchell, Edgar Bergen, Arthur Worsley, Wenceslao Moreno (Señor Wences), and Jimmy Nelson (still alive and performing). It is all great fun to watch.

About half the film is made up of interviews with modern practitioners. I’m very fond of Lynn Trefzger and Jay Johnson, so that was all very enjoyable. Unfortunately, a lot of screen time was devoted to Jeff Dunham. I’m not just being a contrarian here. Terry Fator is now as big as Dunham and I have a high regard for Fator. Dunham is funny enough—amusing but not hilarious. As a ventriloquist, he is barely acceptable at the professional level. As a puppeteer, he is terrible. Watch him with Walter, Dunham can’t even get his lips to sync up with the voice. Whatever.

Both movies are quite enjoyable and worth a watch. There is far more actual comedy in I’m No Dummy, but Dumbstruck is also quite amusing with all the human drama of real lives. Plus: really unpleasant family members!

WASHINGTON—As they scoured the Internet for more juicy details about former CIA director David Petraeus’ affair with biographer Paula Broadwell, Americans were reportedly horrified today upon learning that a protracted, bloody war involving U.S. forces is currently raging in the nation of Afghanistan. “Oh my God, this is terrible,” Allie Lipscomb, 29, said after accidentally stumbling on an article about the war while she tried to ascertain details about what specific sexual acts Petraeus and Broadwell might have engaged in. “According to this, 2,000 American troops have died, 18,000 have been wounded, and more than 20,000 civilians have been killed. Jesus Christ. And it’s been happening for, like, 11 years.” Sources confirmed that after reading a few paragraphs about the brutal war, the nation quickly became distracted by a headline about Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash’s alleged sexual abuse of a 16-year-old boy.

—The Onion, 13 Nov 2012

For the record, Kevin Clash’s accuser has recanted. We don’t cotton to loose gossip about puppeteers around here!

Foreign Policy is a pretty serious magazine. But when Texas last talked about secession, Annie Lowrey at the magazine took notice and had a good laugh about it. At that time, Rick Perry was publicly calling for secession—something she called, “A piece of asinine political rhetoric.” But she did take the whole thing seriously enough to blow it so full of holes anyone would be an idiot to bring it up again.

This time around, of course, Rick Perry is against secession. But this isn’t because he’s learned anything. He is just hoping that by 2016, he may not be too stupid to get the Republican presidential nomination. (He is wrong.)

Most of Lowrey’s analysis focuses on what a hostile withdrawal from the Union would do to Texas. This makes sense, because, as she points out: in Texas v. White, the Supreme Court found that secession was illegal. That was 143 years ago—a long time in terms of stare decisis. So if Texas is going to go, they are going to have to do it against the will of the United Other 49 States of America.

If somehow Texas managed to secede, they would have to put enormous resources into securing their borders. What’s more, their main trading partner—the UO49SA—would be gone. They would have a hard time trading with others in the region, except for maybe the socialist states that aren’t that keen on the USA. But probably not. And Texas would likely become a narco-state.

Lowrey sums it up:

Which I think is really the best approach for Texas now: shut up and pay your damn taxes!

Philadelphia is an interesting place. It is cut up into 1,687 voting divisions. Of these, 59 voted 100% for President Obama. That’s right: in 59 divisions, Mitt Romney did not get a single vote. This is the kind of information that makes even the staunchest Democratic partisan suspicious. Not one vote?

It turns out that this is not all that uncommon. In 2008, there were 57 divisions that cast no votes for McCain. What’s more, Stanford University politic scientist Jonathan Rodden notes that this is just the way things are, “We have always had these dense urban corridors that are extremely Democratic… It’s kind of an urban fact, and you are looking at the extreme end of it in Philadelphia.”

Three reporters at the Philadelphia Inquirer decided to head into these divisions in a hunt for urban Republicans. In particular, there were some registered Republicans in some of them. But what they found was that the Republicans either did not live there any more, or they were Obama supporters who were quite surprised to hear that they were registered as Republicans. On person, a chef named Eric Sapp said, “I got to check on that.”

In the end, they didn’t find any voting irregularity. And really, why would they? If you were a Democratic operative fixing elections, would you really work it so your opponent received no votes? Even apart from how it would look, allowing not a single vote could so easily be used to demonstrate voter fraud; all you’d have to do is find a single uncounted Republican vote.

The truth is that urban voters of all types are strong Democratic Party supporters. And the poorer they are, the stronger their support. These voting divisions are in poor urban areas. And as I’ve argued: that is the true Republican demographic challenge.

There is something in the water over at SNL and it ain’t LSD. Or maybe it is. That would kind of explain the likes of Dennis Miller, Jon Lovitz, and especially Victoria Jackson. On election night, she had a bigger meltdown than most conservatives, claiming that she couldn’t stop crying. And for good reason: “America died.” On the badness scale, that is one notch below, “Music died.” What especially sucks is there is no cool song to go along with it.

That evening Jackson also tweeted the now infamous, “Thanks a lot Christians for not showing up. You disgust me.” Can’t you just feel that Born Again love? You know what Jesus said, “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who votes Democratic to enter the kingdom of God.” So suck it all you America hating commie bastards!

And in this vein, Jackson tweeted this morning, “Obama’s policies (communism) PUNISH the Responsible and REWARD the Irresponsible.” This was following from a tweet last night in which she spread her Christian love:

White people (statistically) don’t have more children than they can take care of without outside assistance.It’s called RESPONSIBILITY.

— Victoria Jackson (@vicjackshow) November 13, 2012

Don’t get the wrong idea here: Victoria Jackson is not racist. You know this because of that caveat. It’s not that white people are better, it’s just that they tend that way—statistically! It’s just science. Like The Bell Curve. It’s not like she wants to kill non-whites; they’re just like Christians; you know: disgusting.

But perhaps we are too harsh on the once talented Ms. Jackson. She has known tragedy. Her first husband—fire eater Nisan Mark Eventoff—left her, because it is apparently easier to swallow fire than Victoria’s bullshit. And her two daughters are rumored to have died recently of extreme cases of shame and embarrassment. Jackson is apparently immune.

On her Twitter desciption, Victoria Jackson lists simply, John 16:33. For those of you not up on your Bible, John is the antisemitic Gospel. Not that I’m saying Jackson is antisemitic. Like most loon Christians, she probably loves the Jews because they are necessary to the Second Coming. After that they can burn in hell, of course. Anyway, here’s the verse:

I’m fond of this verse, because it calls on Christians to chill the fuck out. And they used to! It is only recently that the Religious Right rose up and decided they should work to make their perfect biblical government here on earth. This is why they get so angry at the radical Islamists: they’re competition.

I find it a little sad that Victoria Jackson could be doing all of this as an art form: political satire. It disturbs me that she is clearly not. She is all too typical of her species of born against Christianity that seems to think Jesus was Joseph McCarthy plus magic tricks. Reading Jackson’s comments is one of those rare activities where you truly don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Kevin Drum has written another of those “Republicans need to be nice” articles over at Mother Jones, The GOP’s Immigration Problem Goes Way Beyond Immigration. He specifically discusses the small amount of movement from conservatives on immigration. Drum doesn’t mention this, but it is amusing that conservatives are treating Latinos just like they claim liberals treat women. Throughout the campaign, they said that women cared about economics, not birth control. Well, now the conservatives are claiming that the only reason Latinos hate them is because they didn’t support the Dream Act.

The truth is that the conservatives were always kind of right. Most of what people care about are economic issues. And birth control is an economic issue. Immigration is an economic issue. Being on the right side of these issues is not sufficient to get these groups’ votes, but it is necessary. We need to applaud conservatives who make this small step forward, but I wonder if it will lead anywhere. I fear that they will instead reach a place where they just can’t believe these Latinos want even more.

When I talk about what Latinos want, I’m talking about greater income equality. Drum, in his infinite villager wisdom, is talking about messaging. He quotes conservative fucktard Bernie “The liberal media are destroying America!” Goldberg, “There is a strain of bigotry—and that’s the word I want to use—running through conservative America….That has to leave the conservative movement….I am sick of it.” Drum follows up on this is a most poetic way:

And so on. It’s good writing, but it misses the point. Conservatives don’t talk this way for nothing. Goldberg is right: there are a lot of people who vote Republican because they are bigots. I’m not suggesting that there aren’t racists in the Democratic Party. But they vote Democratic despite their bigotry, not because of it. And let’s get real: given the Republican Party ran a “whites only” campaign this year, they aren’t likely to abandon the racists in their party who are some of their strongest supporters. The party may tone done the rhetoric, but that’s about all.

Of course, all of this talk of racism and the war on women misses the point. Even if the Republicans perfected all their pretty talk and convinced enough people to vote them into power, it would not last. Republican ideology is against everyone but the very rich. The democracy will only allow so much income inequality. After a certain point, the inequality is reduced or the democracy is destroyed. This is why the Republicans have been trying to suppress the vote. They know that in order to continue to be a dominant party they must either water down their ideology or our democracy. I don’t see them working on their ideology any time soon.

I just read Andrew Gelman’s excellent Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State. You have to like statistics, because it’s kind of a dry read. But the data! I can boil down the information in the book in one surprising sentence, “Rich vote Republican, poor vote Democrat, and this divide is most extreme in red states.” Knowing this makes me happy and changes the way I look at politics on the whole.

It makes me happy to know that the poor in Mississippi are not deluded dolts who vote against their best interests. And I feel we share a common cause. Increasingly, I am annoyed by the lack of coverage of this fact and the lack of general reporting that is informed by it.

This morning on Up with Chris Hayes, there was a lot of talk about minority voting—especially Latino voters. Avik Roy, of course, was on the panel to act as an apologist for the Republican Party. And at one point, Lorella Pareli pandered to him by noting that Latinos were church going people and that they were naturally a Republican constituency. Chris Hayes countered her on this point by noting the opinion polls that show that Latinos really do share opinions that put them firmly in the Democratic coalition.

The problem I find with all of this is that we ought to stop even talking about race when it comes to voting paterns. Yes, the Republicans are a racist party. Yes, there is a great deal of racism in this country and we need to do something about it. But if explicit racism disappeared and Republicans stopped being explicitly racist, minority voters would still not rush to vote for them. Minority voters are poor. They vote the way poor people vote. They vote Democratic.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently about the Republican meme that they are not for equality of outcomes but rather equality of opportunity. This is the biggest load of horseshit I have ever heard. Even if all children went to the same schools and did not inherit any property from their parents, rich children would be at a distinct advantage over poor children. There are so many ways that this is manifested, but let me give you one example: Solamere Capital. This is Tagg Romney’s venture capital company. Would a poor child have the necessary contacts to start that? No.

It’s a real hoot that the Fox News crowd have been screaming that the poor vote for people who will give them stuff. As a factual matter this is not true because the rich get more “free stuff” than the poor. See, for example, the 2008 financial crisis. But as Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State makes plan: all voter categories vote for politicians who will give them what they want. Whether that “stuff” is unemployment insurance or a low marginal tax rate doesn’t much matter.

What the Fox News crew are worried about is that the poor really will become as selfish as the rich always have been. And they should be. Republican policies have greatly expanded the numbers of poor. And if those poor get organized, things could be very bad for the Republican Party and even the “New” Democratic Party. Obama won this election 51%-48%. But of those qualified to vote who did not, Obama was the preferred candidate 54%-38%. The Democratic Party has policies that the vast majority of Americans agree with. The Republican Party does not.

Afterword

Here is the most important graph from Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State. This is from the 2004 election. Red are states where Bush won and blue are states where Kerry won. Note that Kerry won in Mississippi with the poor:

Update (21 November 2012 2:12 pm)

I don’t like Chris Matthews. When MSNBC was conservative, he was conservative. Now that they are liberal, he is liberal. But he has nonetheless been making a lot of sense recently. He just had a big debate on his show about what is wrong with the Republican Party. His conclusion: it’s the policies, stupid.

Okay California, you get to keep your fucking death penalty. The repeal proposition failed with 46% of the vote. I just want to say for the record that you people disgust me. Let me describe a conversation I recently had. It explains how you think—in as much as you do think.

I asked a friend if he was going to vote for Proposition 34. He is in favor of the death penalty, but I figured that the financial case against it might appeal to him. After all, his main argument for the death penalty is that he shouldn’t have to pay to feed the bastards for the rest of their lives.

Hell no! He wasn’t voting to get rid of the law. He told me we should just line up the bastards and shoot them. I counted that regardless of what he thought we should do, what we do do is let them rot on death row for years and that this costs much more than just letting them live out their natural lives.

For reasons that still do not make any sense to me, he then told me that we should just line up the bastards and shoot them. I figured it was best that I take a different approach. So I noted that innocent people are often exonerated before we kill them. I suggested that he would not be in favor of killing innocent people. He said he was not.

Good. In that case, why not let these people just serve life in prison? He responded that he did not want to pay for them to do that.

So the circle was closed. And we went around it again. And again. Then I stopped. I couldn’t take it any more.

I’m sure it wasn’t that my friend was that confused. He was just searching for an argument to justify what all of you 54% feel deep inside you. This is the ejaculatory release of killing these bad people. You all get off on the thought of lining up the bastards and shooting them.

All I can say is enjoy this feeling while you can. Because one day we may become civilized like most advanced countries rather than the way we are: like Iran and Saudi Arabia. Make no mistake: the joy you get out of this barbarism makes you less just, not more. And if you consider yourself a Christian: shame on you.

But at least you get to keep your fucking death penalty. For now.

Monday evening, Nate Silver released his final predictions for the presidential race. The most remarkable aspect of the prediction was that Florida, which two weeks earlier had been solidly in Romney’s favor, slipped into a slight lean towards Obama. How slight? Silver predicted that Obama would win Florida by 0.022 percentage points. Earlier that day, I predicted that Florida would go to Obama, based upon the clear trend that had been evident the previous two weeks. Regardless, I predicted even odds that Obama would get 332, 303, or 294 electoral votes. Right now, we aren’t sure which way Florida will go—just as Silver predicted. But we do know that Obama won re-election with either 332 or 303 electoral votes.

I don’t bring this up to show how smart I am. In general, all I did was follow Nate Silver’s work and understand it more than most people. For example, I heard a lot of people claim that they thought Obama would win 313 electoral votes because that was the average prediction that Silver released. But that number was extremely unlikely. What was much more helpful was the electoral vote distribution that indicated that Obama had a 20% chance of getting 332 votes, 16% chance of getting 303 votes, and 13% chance of getting 345 votes. Here it is:

As you may recall, Dean Chambers of Unskewed Polls, predicted a 359-179 vote Obama loss. I went over to his website this morning and it is like a ghost town. But I noted that he had updated his prediction. As of Monday, he had Romney winning by the much less ridiculous margin of 275-263. What does that mean? It means in the end he abandoned his claim that the polls were skewed and went along with them, but gave the benefit of the doubt to Romney in Ohio and Florida.

Needless to say, this is not science; this is partisanship. We saw the same thing throughout the right wing echo chamber. George Will predicted Romney would win 321 votes. Dick Morris predicted 325 votes. What was most interesting about these conservative predictions was how extreme they were. While liberals were mostly predicting modest Obama wins (290 and 294 were the most common), conservatives were all predicting blow outs. The reason for this seems to be that conservatives had to assume that the polls were systematically wrong. In order to predict an Ohio win for Romney, they had to predict that a number of other unlikely states would go for him too. Thus the 321, 325, and 359 predictions.

It isn’t just Nate Silver who did well last night. Drew Linzer of Votamatic had been predicting a 332-206 Obama win for weeks. What all this means, of course, is that as always the polls were right. The models were better than the straight polling averages because they took parameters like trends into account. Real Clear Politics, for example, had Romney up in Florida by 1.5% on Monday. Even still, a simple poll average was enough to predict 49 out of 50 states. There were no surprises last night in the presidential race.

The bottom line here is: don’t mess with the nerds. They may be boring. They may be unfathomable. But they have special Nerd Powers. You’d be foolish to play poker with them. And masochistic to publicly challenge their splendid statistical models of the real world.

Update (7 November 2012 5:48 pm)

Dean Chambers mans up and admits he was wrong. I’m impressed, actually.