Loose Lips []

Anthony Minghella's rep has announced that the writer/director died from a brain hemorrhage after undergoing a "routine operation" on his neck. So sad. • Mariah Carey comes across as shockingly down to earth in an interview with Allure. She says she knows people think she's a "ditzy moron" and, of her tumultuous love life, Mariah explains, "Not to quote Swingers, but 'we all have stories.' I got a freakin' miniseries in me." • Heather Mills has hired celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred to be her "advocate" in the United States. [TMZ, Us, DListed]

The Colbert Bump

THE COLBERT BUMP....Is it really true that congressional candidates who appear on Stephen Colbert's show do better than candidates who don't? Or is it merely truthy? Henry Farrell summarizes the surprising researchy answer from actual political scientist James Fowler:

Democratic candidates who appear on the Report receive a statistically significant "Colbert bump" in campaign donations, raising 44% more money in a 30-day period after appearing on the show. However, there is no evidence of a similar boost for Republicans. These results constitute the first scientific evidence of Stephen Colbert's influence on political campaigns.

Indeed. Fowler explains his methodology here:

To evaluate absolute differences between Colbert candidates and others I use a Wilcoxon signed rank test. This test is non-parametric, which is a super-cool term that means I don't assume that a histogram of the data produces a nice, "normal" bell shape. In fact, I know the data doesn't look that way — it looks more like a skateboard ramp, starting high near zero and curving down sharply to become flat. For percentage differences, I use a related non-parametric (so cool) test called the Mann Whitney U. I'm sure Stephen will be pleased that there is a "man" in his statistical test (though what kind of a man calls himself 'Whitney'?).

And of course there are graphs. What kind of scientificy research would it be if it didn't have graphs?

Residual Force Update

RESIDUAL FORCE UPDATE....Does Barack Obama secretly want to keep 60-80,000 troops in Iraq through 2010? That's what Colin Kahl, a "key adviser," recommends in an academic paper circulated privately at a recent workshop — "a plan," says reporter Eli Lake, "at odds with the public pledge of the Illinois senator to withdraw combat forces from Iraq within 16 months of taking office." But Marc Lynch, who was also at the workshop, calls foul:

Let's just reflect on the absurdity of all of this....Maybe a few dozen people even knew that Kahl had a role at all in the Obama campaign. This is "gotcha" reduced to absurdity. The paper in question was clearly an academic one, reflecting [Kahl's] own personal views. It wasn't even circulated to the campaign, and has nothing to do with Obama's "real" views on Iraq.

Point taken. Presidential advisors have lots of different views — and should have lots of different views. It's newsworthy what these views are, but nobody should jump to the conclusion that any one of them is controlling unless there's some good reason to think so. And anyway, Marc has other fish to fry:

The only really interesting question here is who in that small, closed workshop organized by Colin Kahl decided to screw his host by violating the non-attribution agreement and handing the paper over to Eli Lake? I was there, y'know. I know who was there. By my count, there's about three suspects... and one of them convincingly protests his innocence. I've got an inkling about which of the other two it is. Care to fess up?

Good luck with that!

Friday Butterfly Blogging - 4 April 2008

FRIDAY BUTTERFLY BLOGGING....Inkblot and Domino are on vacation this week. (I know, I know. As if there's a difference.) Taking their place is my mother's cat William, roaming around in her new native-plant, water-friendly, climate-appropriate front yard garden. It's about three months old and coming in nicely. Not a single plant lost yet! And in one of those weird "small blogosphere" coincidences, the landscape designer who installed the garden turns out to be Jerome Armstrong's cousin.

And of course spring is now springing, which means the new garden is starting to attract lots of pollinating bees and fluttering butterflies. The bees are a little too small to catch on camera, but one of the butterflies is on the right. If you live out west, this should all put you in a nice springtime frame of mind. If you don't, it's a harbinger of pleasanter times to look forward to. In the meantime, you can always warm up by offering your cat a lap.

Mukasey Followup

MUKASEY FOLLOWUP....Glenn Greenwald has a followup today on Attorney General Michael Mukasey's claim that the old version of FISA prevented us from intercepting a communication between Afghanistan and one of the 9/11 hijackers in 2001. Glenn finds a note in the 9/11 Commission report that might refer to the missed call Mukasey was talking about, but the report clearly states that FISA was not to blame:

Critically, the Report emphasized that FISA provided all of the authority needed to have intercepted that communication, to learn of its domestic origins and to disseminate it to the FBI and other domestic intelligence agencies. To the extent the NSA failed to do so, this had nothing to do with FISA or any other legal restraints or civil liberties, but rather, with poor intelligence practices....The pre-9/11 failures, as the Joint Inquiry itself concluded, were failures resulting from how the NSA used its legal authorities, not from insufficient legal authorities or excessive legal restraints.

And down the rabbit hole we go. Again: this deserves some followup from the press. Mukasey has spoken about this in public, so if he's claiming that FISA prevented us from intercepting a key call before 9/11 he also needs to defend that in public. Did this really happen or didn't it?

Economic Update

ECONOMIC UPDATE.... Jobless claims spiked upward last week (see chart on right), the unemployment rate has risen to 5.1%, and nonfarm payrolls fell by 80,000 last month. Brad DeLong:

If you didn't think recession was on the way before, you need to think again.

OK, OK, I believe. Now can you please get off my chest? I'm having a hard time breathing.

So this makes — what? Three recessions in a row that were kicked off by an external shock of some kind? Four? Five? Oil shocks in 1973, 1979/81, and 1991, the dotcom bust in 2001, and the credit crisis (and a really slow-moving oil shock?) in 2008. I'm not sure about 1991, though. But if recessions are kicked off more by huge external shocks these days than by Fed-induced inflation fighting, shouldn't we all be thinking harder about how to control those shocks a little better? Time for the big brains to get to work on this.

The Law of Rules

THE LAW OF RULES....Josiah Lee Auspitz is a rules geek. Party rules, that is: "I have written scholarly articles and op-ed pieces, testified, lobbied and litigated, presented maps, tables and charts, consulted, advised and given interviews on the topic....In other words, I am a complete party rules bore. I suppose it would be more dignified to present myself as a political scientist, but I have no illusions."

Three years out of four — and in most cases four years out of four — that would make Auspitz a lonely man. But party rules are unusually interesting this year, and not just for the Democrats. Did you know, for example, that John McCain quite possibly owes his victory this year to the fact that in 2000 the GOP reversed the "order of precedence" in Rule 15 between state party rules and state law? I didn't. But if you read "The Law of Rules," available exclusively online, Auspitz will tell you all about it.

And what about the Democratic side? Auspitz says everything there is going according to plan:

As designed, the competition quickly winnowed itself down to three and then two candidates with national rather than narrow sectional or racial/ethnic appeal. As designed, it greatly increased grassroots participation. And as designed, it has provided in advance that any deadlock will be settled by a pre-existing ex officio group of "party leaders and elected officials" (abbreviated as PLEOs in intra-party documents and called "super delegates" in the press, a term originally introduced with snide intent by those opposed to their creation).

There's much more about the Democratic rules and how they came about, as well as loads of detail about exactly how delegates and superdelegates are apportioned. Some of it is stuff that's already been hashed out quite a bit in the blogosphere, but a lot of it was new to me. It's a genuinely fascinating piece if being a rules geek appeals even slightly to you. Check it out.