Hunting The Muse

Dean's Campaign Stresses

There's a detailed Washington Post article that details a lot of the "bickering" that took place inside the Dean campaign. It's too bad.

The article is a bit slanted, particularly in its implication that Dean "did not really want to be president." The supporting points for that are weak.

But, Mathew Gross, the former lead blogger for the Dean campaign, says the article is pretty much accurate.

Mathew Gross is involved with Change For America. It strikes me as possible that we are seeing the beginnings of public "differences" between Change For America and Dean For America. It's obvious there is at least opportunity for bad blood between the two.

And, here's a response to the article from Howard Dean.

The quotes attributed to me by others in Howard Kurtz's gossipy rendition of the divisions in the Dean for America campaign are entirely false, as is the description of my reaction after losing the Iowa caucuses, before the famous speech.

The danger of using unattributed sources as Kurtz and so many others do, is that the veracity of the informants can not be evaluated. In this case Kurtz included a significant amount of material which was not true, and produced a story which was greatly exaggerated.

There have been many inquiries about the relationship between Dean For America and the Change for America website. The answer to the question is that there is no relationship. We intend to form a progressive grassroots organization based on the Dean for America campaign, and we will work with other organizations after we get set up. We will announce the set up on March 18.

In the meantime, my deepest thanks to all of you who worked so hard to change America. We are not giving up, and we have an outline about what we intend to do on the DFA website.

Many thanks,

Howard Dean

So, Mathew Gross, a public face of Change For America, is on record saying the article is accurate. Dean is on record saying it is not.

This is concerning to me. I want to see a public unity display between these two organizations pronto.

Update: Change for America addresses the situation.

MT-Revision Plugin

If you are a movable type user, you might be interested in my MT-Revision plugin. It saves the "main" and "additional entry" parts of your blog entry, and if you revise those parts of your entry, it saves the revision history. You can then browse the differences between versions.

Nader's Responsibility

Daily Kos || The Ethic of (Ir)Responsibility:

"Nader refuses to entertain any discussion of the real-world effects of his actions as presidential candidate in 2000, either as it affected the voting or in terms of the results of that campaign.  He repeatedly blames Katherine Harris and the U.S. Supreme Court for the fact that Bush became President, while refusing to consider that had he not been in the race that Gore would probably have won New Hampshire and would have won Florida by a margin too great for Harris and Jeb Bush to undermine.  He says little about what he would do as President, revealing that he has no expectation of winning.  He repeatedly make the absurd claim that those who've implored him to not run are just "hostages to an antiquated winner-take-all system" trying to "deny democracy and free speech," when in reality they are just pointing out that millions of people could bear he costs of his irresponsible exercise of democracy and free speech.  In essence, he's painted a picture of himself in as a martyr, but he refuses to see that his saintliness will result not in his sacrifice but in the sacrifice of the legislative and consumer protections he's achieved, the ideals he claims to embody and protect, and the people on whose behalf he claims to act."

This is a great entry. There's a section down below on how to determine whether someone really does have a calling to politics.

Change For America Summit

Change for America: The Evolution of Change for America

Well, this is intriguing. Public summits with secret agendas coming soon to a city near you.

WA Strangeness Conclusion

I posted my conclusion to the whole Washington Caucus matter that I've been following, over at dailykos. I might repost it here if I find cause for revision, but for now, go over there to read it.

Third Party Realities

This is an article that was submitted to kuro5hin.org and then rejected due to partisan voting.

Over the last couple of years, I have done quite a bit of research into U.S. political voting systems and various vote-counting methods. I've come up with the following conclusions, some of which I didn't expect:

1. The presidential race should absolutely not have third-party candidates.
2. Preference voting is not the answer for presidential voting while the Electoral College exists.
3. Democrats and Greens need to share fault for 2000, and share the responsibility to join forces in 2004.
4. Bush technically had more electoral support than Gore even without the Supreme Court's help.

Submitting to Systems; Pragmatic Principles

One of the basic principles that guided my research was the conviction that when one submits to a system, one also has to submit to the pragmatism that that system requires. I can argue all I want about the inequities of our current voting system, but if I'm going to use it (as I should since the political effects will ultimately affect me), I should use it in a way that aligns with my political intent.

For instance, Nader asked us to "vote our principles" in 2000, when many of us had principles that said we liked Nader best, but preferred Gore to Bush. The problem was that our voting system did not have room for these principles. By asking us to ignore our preference of Gore over Bush, those who had that preference but voted for Nader were ultimately casting an unprincipled vote. (Those that believed Nader actually had a shot at winning, or who honestly saw no difference between Bush and Gore, however, were casting principled, if uneducated, votes.) I came to the conclusion that what would have been more principled would be to vote for the candidate closest to my beliefs that had a shot at winning, and then work to implement a voting system that had more room for my principles.

The Electoral College

One system we are forced to submit to is the Electoral College. The first thing to realize about the Electoral College is that it will be very, very, very hard to change it. If 2000 didn't change it, it is hard to imagine what it would require given our current congressional makeup. Replacing it with a nationwide popular vote won't happen as it is too counter to the interests of Congress; it would likely require a different scheme to advocate. At this point, it looks like it would require massive congressional change over a period of years to get enough representatives in there that would vote to overturn it.

Until that happens, it is the only game in town for electing Presidents. And there's one important facet of it to keep in mind: it requires a majority of 270 votes (out of 538) to win.

What this basically means is that for someone to win the Electoral College outright, they have to get more electoral support than all other Presidential Candidates combined. It's not enough to make a good show. You have to decimate the field. Right now when we have two major parties, it's not a big deal, because no other party strongly competes with them.

But imagine what would happen should a Green, Libertarian, or Reform candidate get enough support to actually win a state or two. First, absolutely nothing happens for the third-party candidate. They would have to win at least the eleven most populous states (which includes California, Florida, and Texas; a strange trifecta). But, what would happen is that either the third party would be ideologically similar to one of the two major parties, splitting its support, or it would lead to none of the parties getting 270 votes.

When no candidate gets 270 votes, the election goes to Congress for them to decide among themselves. And unless the third party has strong congressional representation, they are out of luck.

The long and short of it is that if a third party wants to become president, they are either going to have to have a strong enough national party to enable them to win several states outright, or they are going to have to have a strong enough national party that they would have a plurality of congressional representatives in Congress. Either way, it requires a strong national party with significant local and statewide support and a significant number of elected officials. None of our third parties have this level of strong support at this time.

Now, the lazy conclusion would be to think that the third parties should shut up and go away. This is of course wrong. Instead, they should seek to form coalitions.

When more than two parties are represented in parliament or Congress, and when a bill requires a Yes or a No vote, the multiple parties coalesce into two camps. What's important to realize is that coalitions always ensue in democracy. The difference is when they happen.

In parliamentary democracies, the coalitions happen after the representatives are elected. In an effective American democracy, the coalitions can still happen; they just need to happen before the election. This is the advantage the GOP has over the Democrats right now - they have learned this lesson, while the Democrats have not. In 2000, the Greens and the Democrats failed to form a coalition, which is the fault of both parties.

Due to all of this, the reality is that until a third party has a strong enough national party to compete in a presidential election or in Congress, the only way to pragmatically play the game in presidential races is to form coalitions with the party that they are closest to in ideology.

Preference Voting

One way to make it easier for third parties to build nationwide support is to allow preference voting. Preference voting allows people to specify their full preferences and protect themselves from vote-splitting and "lesser of two evils" voting. However, preference voting is not a good idea for presidential elections.

For as long as the electoral college exists, presidential elections will be decided on the state level, state by state. Given the requirements of the electoral college, preference voting only makes it easier for a third party to win a state here and there, throwing the election to the House. This should not be toyed with until a third party honestly has a realistic chance of winning 270 votes worth of states all in one year. For those seeking to implement preference voting, the responsible approach is to seek to implement them for local and statewide races (including national congressional races) in order to build strong national support. But in the meantime, for presidential elections, forming coalitions is the best approach.

And a word about preference voting: it is well-established by now in voting theory circles that IRV is flawed and Condorcet - where the winner beats every other candidate in a head-to-head matchup - is superior. There is also fondness for Approval voting, but there is one problem with this - many state constitutions already make allowances for ranked voting, but not for Approval voting. There is more of an obstacle against it. Approval voting also has a psychological barrier in that people tend to think in choices, and user testing has shown that voters tend to resent giving an equally-weighted vote to their second choice, especially when it results in their second choice winning the election. This has resulted in Approval voting being approved and then thrown out in at least one locality that I've heard of, although I can't find the reference.

National Electoral Support

One of the irrelevant statistics in judging presidential races is the national poll. This is because our presidency is not decided by a national popular vote. Instead, our less populous states are given extra weighting compared to our more populous states, to recognize state sovereignty. This is consistent with how Congress is set up - more populous states get more Representatives, but every state gets two Senators. For presidential voting, every state gets an electoral vote for each Rep and Senator.

A good way to calculate actual nationwide support is to weigh the nationwide popular vote by each state's electoral power. While the implementation of our electoral college is antiquated, this is a way to calculate its actual intent. I calculated this for the 2000 results. I took each state's electoral votes, and split them up proportionally to each presidential candidate, according to how many votes that candidate got in that state. Using this formula, we find for instance that Gore got 12.16 electoral votes in Texas out of 32.

After totalling up all the voting power for each of the candidates, I calculated the "electorally-weighted popular vote", and came to an interesting result. Bush actually outscored Gore. There was no winner take all factor - a swing of a few hundred votes in Florida made no difference. But by applying the ratios to the popular vote, I had a weighted popular vote, with Bush getting 48.17% of the vote, and Gore getting 48.03% of the vote. Bush actually had more electoral support nationwide than Gore did.

Accepting for the moment that Gore actually won Florida, then why did Gore win? There are many inequities in the electoral college implementation, chiefly among them being the winner-take-all nature of each state. And I found that of the seven closest states, Gore got five of them. The other two were New Hampshire, and Florida. The inequities actually worked in Gore's favor, overall.

Now, it is important to remember that these are counting the votes as they were recorded by the various Secretaries of State. And given what we know about Florida disenfranchising tens of thousands of ex-felons (and non-felons), we know that the intent of the voters were more for Gore than the recorded tally shows. I personally believe that the GOP has a fraud advantage of 0.5 - 1%. However, there is not good reason to believe that the fraud advantage the GOP had in 2000 has lessened since then, especially with the onset of blackbox voting.

The basic thing to realize here is that if Democrats want to win in 2004, it is not enough to wish to duplicate 2000 simply with a fairer count. First, there isn't a good reason to expect a much fairer count, and second, the Democrats actually had less electoral support in 2000, only "winning" due to electoral college inequities working in their favor, which is hard to control in future elections. To win, Democrats really do need to build more support.

Conclusion

Overall, this suggests a clear strategy for those interested in supporting Democrats and Greens, improving democracy, opposing the current administration, and having our votes better represent our intent:

• Recognize that 2004 is about building new support for Democrats and constructing arguments to appeal to ambivalent and swing voters.
• To support third parties, immediately seek to always run a candidate against an otherwise unopposed incumbent congressional member. Several House races every year run unopposed, and there would be no vote-splitting cost to run a third party candidate against them.
• Research state constitutions and secretary-of-state policies about preference voting, and lobby your state legislature to allow preference voting for state issues. Start on the local level to familiarize voters. Advocate vote-counting systems where the winner is always from the Schwartz set of Condorcet voting, because vote theorists agree that this is always the most fair result if the intent is to represent consensus public support. Advocate preference voting for local, state, and national congressional elections.
• For presidential races, convince your third party to become active in lobbying the major party that is closest to its ideology, to extract concessions for your party's support.
• Oppose third party presidential races for as long as the Electoral College exists, until a third party has significant nationwide support.
• Oppose opportunity for vote fraud by supporting congressional bills that require paper trails (which are NOT the same thing as receipts that voters take with them, and are therefore not open to the vote-trading flaw), such as Congressman Holt's H.R. 2239 and its companion Senate bill.

There are of course other theoretical and idealistic ways to advocate better U.S. democracy, but at this point they all require either a belief that everything will suddenly change, or a long view of it taking decades to implement. If you subscribe to the long view, work for what you believe in, but consider supporting these shorter-term pragmatic efforts as well.

Marriage Amendment

It comes down to the wording.

Here's the text of the marriage amendment that Bush supports:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.

The media is reporting that as relatively harmless, since it doesn't seem to explicitly rule out other forms like civil unions.

In fact, it does. Basically, it means that if a state passes a law that says marriage-like rights shall be conferred on gay couples, then the Amendment says, "Oh no you don't." It basically makes any civil unions law unenforceable. Anyone can challenge a civil union law and win. Any employer or state can refuse to give gay couples the rights that the civil union law guarantees them, and they're protected. It not only rules out equal rights for gay couples, but removes the teeth from all existing laws like Vermont's.

Nader Asked Dean for VP Slot

Kos reports that Nader asked Dean for the VP slot back when Dean was the frontrunner... amazing.

A commenter made the very good point about that making it even more curious that Nader didn't participate in the Democratic nomination process.

OS X Spam Filter Technique

I love Mail.app, but the junk mail filter isn't as good as it could be. I get over 500 spams per day due to some early-on poor decisions with my email addresses.

It's possible to write an applescript to interact with external spam-classification programs, but the problem is that Mail.app's applescript routines are actually rather sparse, and not very well-documented.

Well! After doing a lot of hacking, research, and asking around (including noticing how other software packages handle it), I think I have figured out the keys to using rules to call Applescripts to filter spam.

I like using Apple's filter to find spam, but there are a lot of false positives. And I don't want to look at all of them. What I needed was a second pass, using a different process to go through all my junk mail and get rid of the mails that were guaranteed to be spam, leaving the small number of doubtfuls and false positives to examine manually.

I am using SpamSieve 2.11 for this. (I have not confirmed if 2.12 works for this yet.)

SpamSieve's instructions say to turn off the internal Junk Mail Filter. I don't want to do that.

Apple's Junk Mail Filter is its own ruleset. The problem is that it is not obvious is that the Junk Mail Ruleset is set to run after all of the user-defined rules are finished.

So, using a technique used in the freeware JunkMatcher, I reordered the rules:

Here are each of the rules:

This rule calls an external applescript supplied by spamsieve. What's interesting is that the flag rule is not applied unless the applescript fails. In other words, if spamsieve catches it, it does what the spamsieve applescript tells it. If it doesn't, then it gets flagged.

This next rule actually just copies the regular junk mail rule, but we're manually defining it so it happens before the user-defined rules are finished. In this case, it moves mail that spamsieve didn't catch into the Junk Mail folder. I'm not sure why it doesn't catch emails that passed the above SpamSieve test, but it doesn't.

This next rule stops rule processing for all junk mails. All ensuing rules will be for messages the junk mail filter didn't catch, including my inactive rule that calls a separate applescript supplied by JunkMatcher.

Finally, the very last rule of your ruleset must be to stop processing all rules. This keeps messages from leaking through to Apple's default junk mail filter that we already defined above, which could possibly (I think) redefine emails that you've already tried to organize.

That's it! The end result for me is that my Junk Mail Filter liberally matches lots of spam and some false positives, which go to the Junk Mail folder. Then, Spam Sieve, which I have conservatively configured to leave behind false negatives but NO false positives, keeps most of that Junk Mail from being in the Junk Mail folder, moving it aside to a separate Spam folder (which is what the applescript does if it succesfully tests for spam). So I'm left with a Spam folder with lots of guaranteed spam that I can delete without examining, and a sparse Junk Mail folder that I can review for false positives.

Works great!

If you have read this far, you may enjoy this article on other spam filters that can be used with Apple's Mail.app.

Fidelity Pledge

Fidelity Pledge Press Release

The thinking goes that since infidelity has done more to undermine marriage than homosexuality, politicians that support the gay marriage ban amendment should be willing to disclose whether their conduct matches their rhetoric. So any legislator that is on record of supporting the gay marriage ban is being asked to sign a pledge of fidelity. Right now it's Colorado only; some are calling for it to go national.

There's an effort to make divorce unconstitutional, as well.

Museworld Wiki

I'd like to announce my new wiki. A wiki is a collection of web pages that anyone can edit right through their web browser. Yes, that means you. Go over there and try it - all changes are saved, so if you screw something up, I can fix it right back up again.

I'll be using it for more static documents that I will want to revise often, and also to invite participation on any collaborative efforts.

I've also started working with a concept I call "social proofs". There's a lack of education out there on civic matters, with many people holding incorrect assumptions on how things work in America. This leads people to hold faulty conclusions. The social proof is a way to present arguments that are well thought-out but concise - if someone disagrees with the conclusion, the can drill down into the argument to research the premises. Finally, if they believe a premise is faulty, they can include their reasoning and declare the proof faulty. Others can then participate in hashing out the premises and modifying the proof.

I've got the beginning of a Proof that seeks to prove that Nader cannot win the presidency. Once I feel that one is sturdy enough, I will be using it to allege that his run is damaging to our democracy. There are plenty of other possibilities for proofs, and anyone can start a new one if they want.

The link to the Proof section is off of the main page of the wiki.

Nader Cedes Democratic Vote

MSNBC - Nader says he's no threat to Dems

Here, Nader says he's not really going for the Democratic vote anyway, and that he doubts many Democratic voters will vote for him. This statement will be incorporated into my proof!

I know I'm focusing a lot of attention on this. The truth is it fascinates me because I don't feel entirely resolved about it. I'm being aggressive on my proof because I want to find chinks on how to oppose the system Nader is opposing, but more effectively than Nader is.

Nader Proof

I have been working on my proof that Nader's run is destructive.

A subproof is that Nader will not win the Presidency. The proof currently has the following weak points:

1. I am attempting to prove that Nader will not take office in 2004 through a system-breaking revolution that installs him in office while ignoring our normal presidential-election process. The occurrence basically requires that such a massive social movement will not take place by November 2004. I'd like to prove that it won't happen.
2. I am attempting to allege that Nader will not be able to gain enough support in the House of Representatives to win there should no candidate get a majority of Electoral Votes. I believe that he would get some votes from Representatives whose congressional districts went to Nader, but that it would not be enough for him to win. But I would like more evidence of this to feel sure.
3. I am attempting to allege that Nader will not outscore all other candidates in enough states to win the several states outright needed to win the Presidency. I'd need more input from political and polling wonks to make this point more convincingly, though.

Once I effectively "prove" that Nader won't win the Presidency, I can move on to whether that's really his goal, and whether or not that makes his run destructive.

So if anyone has comments on how to help buttress the above three points, leave a comment or email me.

I hope to eventually make this proof (and others) available through a wiki.

Dean News

First, Dean comments on Nader.

Second, they are trying to find 100 Dean-supporting citizens who will be running for office for the first time in 2004.

I think idly about this sometimes. But for all the information I follow about politics, I know little about what kind of offices one can run for locally, and where would be a good place to start.

Blogging Senate Candidates

Alaskan Democratic Senate Candidate Tony Knowles just posted a guest blog post over at Atrios.

Update: Digby expands on Knowles over at the american street. Basically, he defines what it means to be an Alaskan Democrat.

Nader Admits More Gore Supporters Voted For Him

Nader for President - www.voteNader.org -

In 2000, exit polling showed that 21% or 25% of my vote would have gone to Bush, 38% or 41% to Gore, and the rest would not have voted.

Fair enough. Nader admitting it is enough for me to declare it undisputed that more Nader voters preferred Gore to Bush than the other way around.

Now we just have to catch Nader admitting that he doesn't think he can win, but that that's not the point. He said that regularly in 2000.

Those two put together would prove that Nader knows he's damaging democracy and doesn't care. In other words, he thinks that increasing the chances of Bush's re-election is a fair price to pay for him marketing his message by running for a presidency he knows he can't win.

That's really want I want to reduce it down to - the argument that sometimes you have to destroy something to eventually heal it. I think that would be an interesting debate to have. I'd sure like to hear Nader's plan to eventually heal the interim damage done to the Supreme Court.

Nader Announces Run

ABCNEWS.com : Ralph Nader Announces Run for Presidency

Nader decides to "challenge this two-party duopoly" by taking an action that does nothing to challenge the two-party duopoly. The Electoral College can't exactly change its mind on how it works. Idiot.

Pop Vs Soda

This is just delightful. I love it. I have no idea what to say about it other than that.

How Do You Feel About Gay Marriage Today?

Josh Marshall writes about gay marriage, and expands on his points after he gets quite a few responses.

I first have to point out one tearjerking email he got from a James in Vallejo, CA:

I just want you to know that my partner and I were married at city hall on Thursday this week. We waiting in line for about 9 hours and were prepared to camp out on the side walk overnight if we had to. In line behind us were two women who had driven 27 hours from El Paso with their son in tow. Just in front of us were two women who had flown in from Virginia and two men who'd flown in from Kansas City. There were also lots of Bay Area couples there. There were couples with babies in strollers and one couple with an aged mother in a wheelchair and hooked up to oxygen.

This is not the right time. There is no right time. There is just the right thing to do. This was the right thing to do.

The Republicans and the far right are going to us as scapegoats no matter what we do. We all know that. We have always known that.

Now they know a little more about us.

Here's what struck me today while reading about all this. Josh is writing a different sort of entry here - he's not making an argument or trying to convince anyone of his point of view. Instead, he's sharing his points of view on the matter at a particular time, while knowing that things are shifting enough that his opinions might change very soon. He, like many others, have held on to the protective ambiguity of "civil unions, not marriage", while acknowledging that the demonstrations of real love may be exposing that opinion for the rationalization it is.

I think Josh is courageous in writing this because I think he knows what may be coming. I recently re-read my war position and, while I still believe that what I wrote is insightful and has lots of important points, I'm struck by how much I was laboring to make them. It was an incredible headwind being blown by the Bush administration at that time, and those sorts of headwinds affect all of us. Writing about opposing the Iraq war is a lot easier today, because it's safe.

We're right in the middle of a transformation where it's a little bit easier for Joe Average to see gay marriage as "safe", and for those that feel the headwinds more than others, I think they'll look back at this time later on and be amazed at how much difficulty they had reconciling their opinions. I'm looking forward to Josh revisiting his feelings in a year.

Nader Joins The Argument

The Nation has an open letter to Ralph Nader pleading with him not to run for president.

Ralph Nader has written a response.

I like what Ralph writes. He spells out a lot of problems, and a lot of reasons to take action against those problems.

However, nowhere does he show that that action must be Ralph Nader running for president.

Nader is a liberal. I mean, come on. He reads The Nation. Rail all you want at how we are prisoners of a linear metaphor, but he's going to get more support from those who prefer Dem over Bush than those who prefer Bush over Dem.

At the end of the day, he says he's trying to defend liberal interests, but he's doing it by holding them hostage.

"Love animals more, or else the kitten gets it!"

The thing that really bugs me about this is that I'm the type inclined to support Nader. I donated to the Green party in 2000. I like his platform better than I like the Democratic voting record. But I've also put a lot of thought - available in these archives - into what American voting means, where it's messed up, and - most importantly - the best steps to take to improve it. Nader's implication is that the only reason I'm not supporting him is because of fear, or because I'm a sheep, or because I somehow lack the consciousness he has. It's insulting; to me, and to other people whose support he needs.

Movable Type Revision History Plugin

I am getting close to completing a plugin for movable type. This allows you to have a full revision history for every weblog entry. I'm also trying to test it, so this weblog entry will serve as something of a testbed for it. The extended entry will have a bunch of gibberish that I'll revise a lot.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

And now I have added text up here.

All men something about coming to the aid of one's country. Did Lincoln say that?

There's stuff having to do with html tags that I should probably test as well, well. Yes.

And I wonder what the heck is up with html links?

The blazing glory of pain comes forth at the most inopportune moments,

like when you are trying to make a salad with walnuts and chevre.

Rolling your eyes can be hazardous to your health because it can give you

headaches, especially if you roll them too hard.

Third eyes aren't always in the middle.

This is a new sentence.

One more to add to the list of comment-spamming, blog-host-faking domains, along with wblogs.com and blogstudio.net: bllogspot.com with a double L, as found in Sam Ruby's comment feed (one of my favorite sources for finding spam domains and blocking them before they find me) with thehomelessguy.bllogspot.com. * One more belonging to the same person, Alexander Morozov, comment-spammer extraordinaire, that is. I was so used to OnlineNIC's whois being down I didn't even think to look.

And it appears I have added text down here as well.

I thought I'd try this:

La la la l

See how that works.

Ok, now for lists.

• adding
• adding
• adding
• adding
• addling
• item one
• item two
• iterm three
• item four
• item five

WA Strangeness Continued

I'm getting closer to having a wrap-up of the whole WA caucus matter. In short it looks like there won't be answers to some of the relevant questions. I've been in contact with people from the WA Democratic Party, and they've been somewhat helpful. I hope to have the details up in a couple of days.

Kerry The Cliffhanger

I figured out the appeal of the Kerry campaign. He's the "Dunh-dunh-dunh!" candidate!

"And so I say to you: We're coming! You're going!"

Dunh dunh dunh!

"I have three words for you: Bring It On!"

Dunh dunh dunh!

"For those that want to make this about national security: I look forward to that debate!"

Dunh dunh dunh!

"If they want to do in this campaign what they did to Dukakis, then everything is on the table. Everything."

Dunh dunh dunh!

It's the chord that doesn't resolve... the crescendo... the cliffhanger... the foreshadowing of something BIG coming... right... after... these... messages!

Here's the thing about cliffhangers.

Part Two usually sucks.

Dean

Dean dropped out today, and also recommitted to continue with the movement he helped start. By doing both, he demonstrated to me again that he is an inherently unselfish man, and has the qualities needed to be a real leader.

Dean On Stage

Dean's Wisconsin concession speech didn't have any stunning announcements but there were some interesting touches. He spoke in past tense a few times, for instance, thanking the unions: "They stuck with us through thick and thin."

He said the goal of the campaign was to change this country, and said: "guess what, you have succeeded."

He offered general reassurance by saying to think about how far we have come.

He had one that I thought was a nicely genuine touch. He mentioned how many of the people there tonight were young. Paraphrased: "When you're young, you want change to happen fast. The truth is that change is tough, and there's an enormous pressure against change, from Washington, from the Democratic Party..."

He said that they have already written the platform of the Democratic Party for this election. He said that while change had happened, though, it was "a change of convenience, not a change of conviction", and that we needed to keep fighting for that change of conviction. He said that we finally do have a democratic party that found out if you stand up and say what you believe, that voters actually like it.

And then his thematic resting point was "we will not stop." "You have already started to change the party, and we will not stop." He left vague the concept of exactly what wasn't going to stop.

"We are not done yet together." I'm left wondering about the punchline.

WI Projected For Kerry

From the CNN partial returns for Wisconsin...

As I said, I think the whole vote-counting thing with projections is weird. See here as Kerry is projected winner even as Edwards currently has more votes.

Update: Obviously, projections is a technical business having to do with statistical sampling and analyzing which sets of returns have already come in and which ones haven't. I just thought it was amusing to see the numbers in that shape.

House Races

Democrats are currently down 228-204 in the House of Representatives. The House, which was initially designed to be the most responsive branch of government to changes in the nation's political tastes, is heavily gerrymandered, and so changes in the balance of power are hard to come by. Well it looks like tonight a Democrat in Kentucky has won a historically Republican district. It's huge news because it's seen as a bellwhether on Bush's political health. One down, many to go.

Gay Marriage

I'd really like to see someone with more research abilities than me do a well thought out analysis of the gay marriage debate and how it compares and contrasts with the interracial marriage or "miscegenation" debates of the past. I personally think they are highly comparable, and that the arguments against gay marriage are going to sound just a bigoted a few years from now as the arguments against interracial marriage do now.

Electoral College Notes

I've written before that I like the basic intent of the Electoral College and how it tries to represent region as well as population.

It's the implementation that I don't like - each state being winner-take-all, with the national winner requiring a majority rather than a plurality. It's what makes third-party presidential runs such a threat to our democracy.

I've thought a better version would be to proportionally award EVs for each state by the percentage support each candidate gets, and allow fractional EVs, and allow a plurality of the total to determine the nominee. It doesn't get rid of the spoiler problem, but it does then mean that we can use preference voting, like Condorcet, to find the winner of each state.

However, I just thought of a problem with that. There is no solid way to determine proportional support for each candidate, that I know of, using preference voting like IRV or Condorcet. You can determine 1st place, 2nd place, etc, but you can't determine what percentage of support each candidate got.

So hrm. I'm stuck again.

Dean Probably Leaving Race

MSNBC - Top aides say Dean may stand down

Folks have been buzzing about it for a while, but this is the first I've seen of the Dean campaign itself acknowledging their aims to convert their campaign from a Presidential run to a political movement.

So yeah. Barring a truly bizarre surprise in the debate today or before Tuesday, it basically means Dean is leaving the race.

Mathew Gross's Blog

Mathew Gross is the guy who wrote me personally to ask me if I'd endorse Dean on my weblog, while he was one of the main guys in the Dean campaign. For a while I was flattered and said that I supported Dean "because Dean's the only guy who asked". ;-)

Mathew is gone from the campaign now and has started his own new weblog.

Saddam and the U.N.

One thing I'd like to see a bit more often in the news is the statement that it was simply impossible for Hussein to be in compliance with resolution 1441.

Sharpton Over Dean

Oof. Sharpton finished ahead of Dean in DC. Here are the results. Kerry wins again.

Dean's Race

I haven't written about Dean in a few days because I've been pretty down in the dumps about it all.

If Dean turns it around from this point, it will definitely be a bigger turnaround and transformation than what happened with Kerry's resurgence. It'll be one of the most amazing political stories I can imagine, and I'd be fully behind it. That said, I think that for Dean to win the nomination, it would require something just that amazing.

While a post-mortem isn't exactly appropriate yet since he hasn't dropped out, I do think it's appropriate to think about what has happened that has gotten him to this point, and what was missing to get him further.

I'm referring to some things in past tense not to declare Dean's campaign over, but to emphasize what sort of change is needed to turn things around.

First, the level of Dean's support early on was illusory. I do believe that. The combination of Bush's infuriating behavior and the internet's ability to act as a megaphone for activist behavior served to create a lot of momentum for the activists. It's like that cliche movie scene where you have the complacent enemy standing around bored, and then all of a sudden they hear angry howling, and they see huge menacing shadows on the wall from an advancing enemy... they start to run, and then the enemy turns the corner and there's like three of them. The enemy turns around and mows them down.

Obviously Dean has more than three supporters. But the point is that it's still one person, one vote, and Dean's activist minority didn't have a chance against the complacent majority.

The main problem was with Dean's marketing. They had an awesome marketing strategy to reach the activist grassroots. But it wasn't a dual-purpose strategy; it didn't work very well in reaching the rest. You can almost compare it to Sales - it's like a salesperson resting their reputation on their conversion history rather than their conversion rate. While Dean had done a great job building up early support, he didn't actually have a very good strategy for converting the next very large chunks of voters, who were very different kinds of citizens.

There was of course a ton of things that hurt him that weren't the campaign's fault. Gephardt's murder-suicide act in Iowa (which, I didn't realize, was explicitly admitted by Gephardt's campaign after the fact). The press's freakout in trying to make up for their early lack of Dean examination by running with stories like the Canada talk show and that bizarre time-traveling wife-beating trooper story. The press's coverage of Dean's cheer after the Iowa loss. But in my mind this all served to pile on to a weakness that was already there. I believe that if he had taken steps to shore up that weakness, the other things, while damaging, would not have killed him in the first few states.

The thing is, that weakness is still there. He still hasn't figured out how to turn around the undecided voters. His problem is (and I have to swallow hard to say this), his message still comes across to the layman as basically negative.

In short, he's professing change, but he's focusing on what to change from, not what to change to.

I know this can be argued, but Dean saying that it's a campaign based on hope sounds good, but it's not enough. A Deaniac talking about all the hope they feel is great, but it doesn't seal the deal. The reason is because this kind of hope is amorphous. Most of us Dean followers felt hope about him for our own personal reasons - in my case because I liked how the campaign wasn't top-down, and I judged he'd run the country the same way. But my conclusion there was based off of my own past experience with the Dean campaign, not because of any explicit promise that Dean made about his future administration. The most that I've found he said about that was "I don't see why not," when asked about whether the blog would continue.

Dean is still drawing distinctions against Kerry by pointing out Kerry's bad points rather than explicitly pointing out what he'll do in contrast as President (well, maybe he is, but it's not exactly being aggressively marketed).

So to me, his campaign was missing one basic thing, and I think that if he had offered it, it could have made a huge difference:

Dean needed to market a plan. A comprehensive, thematic system that would allow people to visualize how the country would actually be different under his administration.

I'm really frustrated that he hasn't done this, because it has a history of working. The New Deal. Gingrich's Contract For America. People like it when there's something they can get behind that is more than just the candidate. Dean's always had a credibility problem in that he just seemed too small somehow by himself - the insurgent from Vermont. You combat that by making the campaign be about more than the candidate. He did that, but by clinging to intangible ideals and the momentum of passion. It's ephemeral, it had to dissolve sometime. It might have been different had he marketed a tangible plan for America, where the distinctions from the other candidates would be obvious and he could run on the positivity of the plan.

I hope that after he loses Wisconsin, he goes back to Burlington and comes up with something like this to publish and distribute to everyone in America. It might be the one thing that could give him one last shot.

Cool Maps

Home Page - The National Atlas of the United States of America

I found the coolest mapmaking site - tons of free information that you can use to make your own maps online, and tons of gorgeous free preprinted maps that you can download. Probably the coolest find since I found the PDF of the world map of political boundaries (countries) that you can zoom to any level.

Recount Solution: Don't Recount!

This article describes Florida's novel solution to the whole ballot recount problem - just don't require recounts anymore.

Drudge/Kerry

I've had two people email me already about Drudge. It's always painful to link to that man's site. But this could have a real impact even if it's not true. Evidently there's some big brouhaha over Kerry allegedly having a recent affair with an intern. More interestingly, Clark has predicted (weeks ago) that the Kerry campaign would implode over it, Clinton has supposedly called Edwards asking him to continue the race, and it's the reason why Dean reversed his decision to withdraw after Wisconsin a few days ago. That's all heresy from daily kos .

I don't think there's very much active polling going on in Wisconsin, so next Tuesday's election could be very, very interesting.

Update: Al Giordano believes this could have been planted by Kerry. Pandagon believes quite the opposite. Wisconsin's polls are currently awful for Dean.

Bush AWOL Stuff

I have to say that I have a bad feeling about all the Bush AWOL stuff. I think it could blow up in the Democrats faces the same way that a lot of the Lewinsky stuff did to the Republicans.

First, I don't really understand what the issue is. Like, why it's actually important other than to make Bush look like an idiot. I mean, that's fun and everything, but what's the substance of it? The only thing I can think of is that if it's finally able to be painted that we've got a wartime coward just in time to contrast it with a Genuine Vietnam War Hero in our alleged nominee John Kerry, it could give him political momentum.

But this stuff about the physical, and arrests? What if it comes out that Bush was gone for a little while because he hit bottom and was addicted to drugs for that period of time? Bush could come on with his whole born-again thing, how he turned around his life, and how he had to keep it secret because of the political hay his enemies would make out of it, and all his supporters would redouble their commitment to him. This could very well end up generating sympathy for him.

Like I said, I don't have a good feeling about this. Stick to 9/11 and Iraq and jobs and the deficit and... good god, it's not as if we're lacking for relevant material.

Trippi's Blog

Change for America: Digital Democracy

Joe Trippi has a blog now, and here he personally addresses the whole brouhaha about his paycheck.

Palindrome Poem

I finally found that awesome poem I read a long time ago and have mentioned to my friends. It's a Palindrome Poem, called "Doppelganger", written by James A. Lindon. You can start either with the first line and read forward, or the last line and read in reverse, and it's the same poem... but that structure has a cool dramatic effect, too.

Doppelganger

Entering the lonely house with my wife
I saw him for the first time
Peering furtively from behind a bush --
Blackness that moved,
A shape amid the shadows,
A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes
Revealed in the ragged moon.
A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have
Put him to flight forever --
I dared not
(For reasons that I failed to understand),
Though I knew I should act at once.

I puzzled over it, hiding alone,
Watching the woman as she neared the gate.
He came, and I saw him crouching
Night after night.
Night after night
He came, and I saw him crouching,
Watching the woman as she neared the gate.

I puzzled over it, hiding alone --
Though I knew I should act at once,
For reasons that I failed to understand
I dared not
Put him to flight forever.

A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have
Revealed in the ragged moon.
A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes
A shape amid the shadows,
Blackness that moved.

Peering furtively from behind a bush,
I saw him for the first time,
Entering the lonely house with my wife.

Clark Dropping Out

ABCNEWS.com : AP: Clark Drops Out of Presidential Race

Could be good for Dean, could be good for Edwards. Unless he endorses Kerry.

Dean's WA Delegates

King County Caucus Results

For those of you who remember an email floating around about a WA voter who witnessed three of Dean's delegates get inaccurately recorded for other candidates, the county where this happened is putting online spreadsheets that show all of the delegate totals for each precinct in that county. Right now only the 36th District is up, but the others should be coming soon. They are doing a recount of some of these districts. What this means is that for King County anyway, voters can look up the recorded vote for their precinct and verify if the total is the same as what they remember. If it isn't, they can write a letter to the state chair to ask for a data recheck.

Kucinich Making A Run?

Big, Left, Outside: Noon Exit Poll Numbers: TN and VA

Al Giordano, who foretold Kerry's rise when everyone wrote him off and has a fair amount of insider experience, shares a "mischevious thought" about how Kucinich could actually emerge as the lone anti-Kerry and what affect it could have on the race.

Trippi's Supposed Conflict Of Interest

The CJR Campaign Desk has an article wondering aloud why more wasn't made out of Trippi earning a commission on the Dean ads bought from his advertising firm.

I think it's probably because it would be pretty ridiculous to make the case that Trippi's chief goal in the campaign was to make money off of advertising. Like all the traveling, cracked ribs, strategizing, and cheerleading was just him going through the motions to land his ad buys. Right.

Trippi Notes Flaws Of Transparency

Joe Trippi spoke at a conference this weekend and noted the flaws of having a transparent political campaign. Some of the heavy-duty bloggers will probably be covering this talk in much more detail in coming days.

Calling the WA Democratic Party

I have another status report over at dailykos regarding my efforts to talk to people in WA about all the numbers. See my previous entry to know what I'm talking about.

Precinct Reporting Is Weird

Here were the precinct results in WA with 16 precincts reporting:

       John Kerry      Dem     593     35.0%     0
       Howard Dean     Dem     486     28.7%     0
       Dennis Kucinich Dem     432     25.5%     0
       Wesley Clark    Dem     66       3.9%     0
       John Edwards    Dem     58       3.4%     0

(update: This probably was supposed to be 16% precincts reporting.)

And here they were with 140 precincts reporting:

       John Kerry      Dem    1321     49.3%     0
       Dennis Kucinich Dem     499     18.6%     0
       Howard Dean     Dem     487     18.2%     0
       Wesley Clark    Dem     151      5.6%     0
       John Edwards    Dem     138      5.2%     0

(update: I corrected a typo in the above table. Plus, 140 precincts has to be wrong, because there are an average of four delegates per precinct in WA. This had to have been a typo on the AP's part. It's more like 1300-1350 precincts.)

That strikes me as odd. What's with Kerry practically sweeping 124 4% of the precincts, except for Kucinich having significant support and Dean coming in last with only one additional delegate?

Here's a history of the WA precinct reporting.

Update: I also wrote about this over at daily kos where it is starting to raise some concern. I'm relieved because I thought it would just look like I was trying to make an issue out of nothing. I just want to nail down the loose ends. Others are sharing stories about how when a precinct came up with votes, the computer operator input a different number of votes. Please read on or participate if you have ideas for next steps, if any.

Update: There is a follow-up post at dailykos detailing one voter's experience of witnessing delegates being unfairly taken away from Howard Dean.

Update: There is another another follow-up over at dailykos that shows status from the above WA voter in trying to verify precinct data.

Update: Make sure to read my main weblog to see more status reports.

Read on for more details...

This is the screenshot of when 140 ~20% of the precincts were reporting. Dean gains one delegate out of 124 4% of the precincts, while Kucinich gains 67.

Then for a short while, CNN had the following numbers up - with 21% (around 1376) precincts reporting. Kerry's numbers are slightly less, and Kucinich's are signifcantly less, enough for there to appear to be a much bigger lead for Kerry. The Kucinich situation is strange because he had a strong total for a more than one phase of reporting, and here his numbers go down significantly. If this was a simple error, what was it? These numbers, used by CNN and Fox, were not AP numbers, and Fox was overheard saying they got their numbers from the Democratic National Headquarters.

Almost simultaneously, the AP updated their numbers with 1397 precincts reporting. Notice that here, Kucinich's numbers are still high, and Kerry is below 45%. This set of numbers stayed up on the AP wires for several minutes.

The previous CNN batch of numbers was only up for a couple of minutes, before they were replaced by this next set of numbers. Notice that these numbers still have little relation to the AP numbers, and Kucinich's numbers are still low. This set of numbers with Kerry at 50% is the one that was reported in all the articles and repeated ad infinitum by Fox News. Note that they say 32% precincts are reporting.

Here is where it gets stranger - soon at 2:31 PST, the AP released new numbers, with 2248 precincts reporting, later revised to be 2125 precincts reporting. This has more precincts reporting than the above CNN/Fox numbers, but Kerry has less delegates, and his delegates are more in line with all the other AP numbers. Also note that Kucinich is still up in the 500 range - also consistent with the AP numbers, but in conflict with Fox and CNN.

This makes me curious about what the heck was up with that set of numbers that Fox/CNN was reporting, of Kerry at 50% with 1924 delegates - which was the set of numbers reflected in the wire articles. They don't even appear to be based in reality, even when these were the numbers reported all over the news.

The revision from 2248 precincts reporting to 2125 precincts reporting:

At 2:49, CNN finally revised their numbers. The Kerry@50% numbers were at 32% reporting, while these are at 34% reporting. Note that Kerry's numbers are revised downward, significantly. Why were Kerry's numbers inflated for the set of numbers that all the news articles talked about?

Note that as of 2:54, Fox was still referring to the other set of 34%-reporting numbers that had Kerry at 50%.

Soon, at 2:58, CNN updated their numbers again. While everyone else's numbers grow significantly, Kucinich's numbers are again revised downward, which again, is weird.

Things start progressing more regularly from this point. At 3:22, 55% (3588) are reporting.

CNN, WaPo, and AP project Kerry at 3:43.

At 4:20, all three sources release numbers from 71% precincts (4624) reporting:

Additionally, the AP has a first draft of delegates apportioned - this is not the complete slate of delegates, but perhaps only from certain congressional districts:

From this point on, they grew basically proportionally until the latest results, 97% reporting:

---

So here are my questions. For someone like me who doesn't work in the Secretary Of State's office, I would expect that once a number is received from the precinct, it is vetted before it is released to the AP. And when 500 precincts are reported, I'd expect that all candidates' delegates should grow or at the very worst, remain the same, when 1000 precincts are reported. Instead, we're seeing a lot of examples of delegates going down. So most of my questions concern where the errors are happening. Do we know that certain precincts vastly misreported their delegate count? Who is it that has the power to revise the numbers? How could Kucinich's numbers have sunk by over three hundred delegates when each precinct didn't have more than twenty or thirty delegates to award? Could that many precincts have been wrong all at the same time?

But my bigger question is, where's the opportunity for monkey business? How do we know there isn't any cheating going on here? I'm a programmer that has to deal with security issues on a daily basis, and I know that security isn't just about monitoring the entry and exit points - you have to be vigilant at every step along the way. When a precinct captain calls in their numbers, how do we know that the other end is recording those numbers? When the precinct captain goes home, they can't trace it back in reverse. Where's the list that shows exactly how many delegates each precinct got, and how that adds up to the total, so every precinct captain can then refer to the same document and verify that that was their total? I heard that in other states, this information is not published because the parties want to keep that demographic information private from other political parties. If that is so, it is definitely opportunity for fraud through obfuscation.

I am not alleging fraud, or even opportunity for fraud, because I honestly don't know enough about how it works to point out the opportunity. But it did strike me as weird that there was so much downward revision of delegate numbers after they had already been reported.

Update:

This is with 99% precincts reporting. Note that there are still over 4,000 delegates left to be awarded out of 27,000. There are 55 precincts left to report. Remember that there is an average of four delegates per precinct. What is it that is up with the remaining precincts? What are the chances that only 55 remaining precincts - with 4,000 delegates between them - would mirror the percentage split of candidates that has already been reported?

"The Fix Is In"

Josh at Talking Points Memo puts his finger on why the Iraq commission is useless.

Roy Neel Is Human

Blog for America:

"Last Tuesday night I let myself get a little down." - Roy Neel, Dean campaign manager.

Man... that's more like it. That seals the deal for me, I think that the move from Trippi to Neel was a good one. Acknowledging doubts and rebounding to hope is a lot more genuine than denial-filled cheerleading. This guy's got credibility.

John McCain's Objectivity

MSNBC - Intelligence panel includes McCain:

"The president of the United States, I believe, would not manipulate any kind of information for political gain or otherwise." - John McCain

Well, isn't that the whole point of the damn commission? Why even show up?

MA and Gay Marriage

Here's two quotes on the MA gay marriage decision.

Dean: "Today's decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court represents a different approach to the same goal.  One way or another, states should afford same-sex couples equal treatment under law..."

Kerry: "I oppose gay marriage and disagree with the Massachusetts court's decision."

The thing is, what Kerry said is going to be widely accepted as a bigoted statement fifteen or twenty years down the road, and everyone knows it, even the Republicans. This debate is going to parallel the debate on miscegenation.

Kerry reacts to what he thinks the national mood is, and forgets about the option of trying to actually lead. I do not believe Kerry is a leader, and I fear that the population is going to realize this about him too late to make a change in nominee.

WA Radio Ads

Home Page TruthandHope.Org

This is more like it. A couple of Deaniacs in WA soliciting donations from people who have already maxed out their donations for Dean, to air some home-produced radio ads - which are quite good - on the radio station in Washington State. They only need a couple thousand dollars and have already managed to buy a ton of ad time.

Remind Us

Kai Curry has a great flash presentation of audio snippets of our leaders giving justification for the Iraq war. It's a great presentation of it all, at least up until it starts doing that thing with the American flag, which is way too heavy-handed.

Kerry's Appeal

I think I finally figured out why Kerry has the appeal he does.

For months, we've had polls where an "Unnamed Democrat" beat Bush in 2004, even though Bush beat all of the named candidates head to head.

Kerry's the only one that was smart enough to realize that and co-opt the "Unnamed Democrat"'s campaign. He's making himself as bland as possible. Kerry symbolizes nothing except for "Not Bush", and that's why people are voting for him. Bush has bullied everyone for three years into a state of learned helplessness, and they're stumbling through with barely enough wits about them to blindly reach for the most obvious Not Bush candidate out there.

All the rest of the candidates make these voters think. They don't want that. They just want a generic, obvious, Not Bush guy so they can get on with it already.

Prancing Horse

MSNBC - Cubans sailing vintage car caught off Florida

We played a card game where guys ask girls "guy questions" and vice versa. We asked a friend "What car has a prancing horse as its icon?" She answered "Buick?"

Well, a Buick isn't really a Ferrari, but, as the article shows, you can evidently do some things with it that you wouldn't with a Ferrari...

From Dean To Everyone Else

Many-to-Many: Exiting Deanspace

For those wondering why Dean lost so many supporters so quickly in the first few states, Clay Shirkey has a very well-argued essay about why that might be - his argument is that the vast number of supporters might never have been there in the first place.

The Horse Race

Here's how the actual delegate race looks as of now.

This is a quick program I wrote where I can store the current delegate total for each candidate in a database, and automatically generate the image based on election results.

The black line is where a candidate needs to get in order to be the nominee.

Long way to go, huh?

(And not bad, if I do say so myself, having written it in 40 minutes.)

Update: Well, it appears that CNN has one that is just a teensy bit prettier.