Miracle of the Loaves? A video to make even an unreconstructed Obama fan like myself cringe, featuring a "journalist" and a former Sport Illustrated swimsuit model. For crissakes, ladies, he's a pol who came along at the right time, not the freaking Messiah. After all is said and done, we're still going to be in a recession tomorrow night, no matter how spectacular Arianna's or Oprah's parties are.

Hathaway's Norbit: The critics rave:

"The most lamentable thing about the dismal Bride Wars is the total absence of fatalities."

Actually, I blame Kate Hudson for this debacle. No other actress this side of Zooey Deschanel has a worse track record in consistently appearing in turkeys than the former step-daughter of TV's Shirley.

Franken wins ?!? It would appear so, although the incumbent can probably keep him out of the Senate for awhile. Although Air America has had a reputation for being something of a dud, I think it's safe to say that there is no way Franken could have become a viable Senate candidate without the exposure his morning radio show gave him, and Rachel Maddow has been able to parley her exposure on AA to a rather successful prime time gig at MSNBC. I guess sometimes it's not the quantity of the audience that matters, but the quality.

The Marriage Counselor: As I read this, I thought it was a spoof of some sort, like Swift's "A Modest Proposal." But no, Dennis Prager is serious about this. Kinda reminds me of a story told about the late USC and Tampa Bay football coach John McKay, who once explained to reporters that he hadn't actually made a certain derogatory comment about his longtime coaching rival from Stanford (and the Denver Broncos), John Ralston, after he had run up the score against McKay's winless '76 Buccaneers: "I would have called him a prick, but a prick has a head." [link via Mark Kleiman]

A good primer on what motivates the New Deal Denialists, here. One nice thing to remember is that most of the stimulus package that will come out of Congress will not be subject to a filibuster in the Senate, since it's a budgetary matter. So by all means, GOP, oppose away....

Matthew Yglesias seems bemused that Amity Shlaes, the David Irving of New Deal Denialism, is a "senior fellow in economic history from the Council on Foreign Relations," even though she is as qualified to dish on economic history as Heidi Montag. Indeed, one of the great joys in the coming Liberal Age will be the growing marginalization for the recipients of what has come to be known as "wingnut welfare." A thinktank like the CFR is going to be less-inclined in the future to give out goodies to ideological hacks like Ms. Shlaes when all the action is likely going to be on the other side of the spectrum.

It had been my hope to go on vacation from the blog until our new President was sworn in, and start afresh in what I hope to be the beginning of a new liberal era in American politics. But I couldn't let the opportunity go without recommending one of the best political blogs out there, ArchPundit, which specializes in Illinois politics, and which has been the one go-to sight since the Blagojevich Follies started. He's been right on this subject from the start, as this post from the week before the scandal broke nationally shows.

O !!!!!!!!

Election Eve News: Besides the favorable polls, and the bellweather result of the final Redskin home game, there's Dixville Notch and Pete Carroll, both for Obama. Also, Luc Robataille....

The Bradley Effect:

There should be a support group for all those beleaguered progressives who over the years anxiously awaited elections in the futile hope that the polls showing their candidate behind would turn out to be wrong -- but who this year are fretting just as much that the polls showing their candidate ahead are wrong.

--David Kurtz, TPM

In 1982, Tom Bradley led in the polls from the start of the California governor's race up to election day. The exit polls showed him winning a clear victory over the GOP nominee, George Deukmejian, and seemed to be on the verge of becoming the nation's first black governor since Reconstruction.

And in the end, he lost. Since then, every time an African-American politician underperforms his poll numbers, the phenomenum known as the "Bradley Effect." It happened when Douglas Wilder actually became the nation's first black governor in 1989 by a margin much smaller than his projected total from exit polls, and then when Harvey Gantt was beaten by Jesse Helms in 1990 for the US Senate, and even more recently, when Barack Obama was unexpectedly defeated in the New Hampshire primary by Hillary Clinton at the beginning of the year.

The "Bradley Effect," the notion that there is a hidden racist vote that doesn't appear in the polls, is an anchor that every African-American politician has to carry when seeking office before a predominantly white electorate. And it is the chief reason why even four days before the election, with a larger lead in the polls than anything Bradley or Gantt had at this time in their losing efforts, there is still some skepticism among liberals that Senator Obama really has this one in the bag.

Clearly, the Bradley Effect is something that has diminshed over time; as political historian Sherry Bebitch Jeffe points out, Tom Bradley was really screwed by a hidden racist vote in his first, unsuccessful campaign to be Mayor of Los Angeles, when Sam Yorty, one of the last vestiges of the pre-Depression Democratic Party in California that was more allied with William McAdoo and the South, painted the former cop as a secret Black Panther, and turned a sixteen-point Bradley lead into a six-point deficit on election day. Four years later, Bradley decisively defeated Yorty in the rematch, and went on to win a record five terms as Mayor.

Still, there is some reason for discomfort. Obama consistently underperformed his polling numbers when it actually came time to vote during the primaries; first in New Hampshire, then on Super Tuesday in states like Massachusetts and California, then later in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. He ultimately won his party's nomination because he was better organized, state-by-state, than his opponent, allowing him to survive some early defeats and take charge of the race after Super Tuesday, when Hillary Clinton's campaign ran out of money.

And there's the original Bradley Effect, in 1982. There has been quite a bit of revisionist claims that even in 1982, there was no hidden racist vote. Both Lance Tarrance, who polled for the winner, and William Bradley (no relation), who worked for the loser, as well as Prof. Jeffe, point to other factors in Deukmejian's win, including a gun control measure on the ballot that pulled in a lot of conservative voters, as well as a first-rate absentee voter drive that year by the GOP. In particular, William Bradley focuses on the flawed sample of voters polled by Mervyn Field on Election Day, a sample that also caused his outfit to project a victory for Jerry Brown in his losing Senate race against Pete Wilson; anyone who remembers the 2004 Presidential Election knows to take exit polling with a grain of salt when it comes to projecting elections.

But there was a Bradley Effect in 1982, and it can be found not in the exit polls, but in the final polling Mervyn Field did before election day. The link is to every major statewide race Field polled since 1948, when he, like the rest of his brethren, blew the Truman-Dewey election. Since then, Field's final polls have correctly predicted the winner in all but three races, and two of those races involved picks that held tiny pre-election leads and lost by slim margins. The outlier was the 1982 governor's race: Field's last poll showed Bradley with a comfortable eight-point lead, whereas the actual vote showed a two-point margin, a 10-point switch.

OK, so maybe his sample wasn't an accurate cross-section of California voters, as his exit-polling on Election Day would indicate, and as Tarrance, Jeffe and the other would concur. But the real problem with that argument is Field's final poll of the aforementioned US Senate race, showing then-Governor Brown losing by six points to Pete Wilson. As the chart shows, that was the exact margin Brown lost to Wilson. And it was a concurrent poll, taken in the final week of the campaign.

So the same polling sample, conducted concurrently, correctly predicted not only the win by the Republican Senate candidate, but the ultimate margin as well, while blowing the governor's race by ten points. I find it hard to believe that Field nailed the race that involved two white candidates, but somehow didn't pick up some trend having nothing to do with racism that would have skewed the same polling sample when it came to the governor's race.

A Critical Retraction:

From British theatre critic Mark Shenton: Critics are only human - we all make mistakes. And no one beats me up more for mine than me! So today it’s time to fess up, as they say Stateside, to one of mine: I’ve already admitted here to attending Waste at the Almeida (not so) fresh from a transatlantic return journey, and now I’ve discovered that I must have written my review, too, in an advanced state of jetlag, too.

In my Sunday Express notice, I referred to a fine ensemble cast that includes “Will Keen as the politician and the superb, graceful Phoebe Nicholls as his long-suffering wife. ” Except, of course, that Phoebe Nicholls is playing his sister, not wife.

(snip)

But at least I am not alone: I did a quick trawl of other reviews, and discovered that the identical mistake was perpetrated by two other colleagues! In his Tribune notice, Aleks Sierz even draws the conclusion that it reveals that the play suggests that the English are not much good at love: “When his wife, Frances, finally confronts him at the end of the story, Henry shows a sublime indifference which makes you wonder why the couple haven’t gone their separate ways long ago. No, the chief erotic drive in the play - and the only thing that makes it bearable to watch- is its boys’ club politics: not sex, but power. When the men talk affairs of state, the pulse quickens. Directed stolidly by Samuel West, Waste is a perfect example of the ghastly lack of warmth between the sexes among the English upper classes during the first part of the last century.”

And in the Jewish Chronicle, John Nathan writes, “Phoebe Nicholls as Trebell’s loving but sexually uninterested wife outshines even Keen’s excellent performance.” Those two further wrongs, of course, don’t make it right that I got it so wrong, too - and of course our common mistake is now embedded for posterity in the pages of Theatre Record and/or the internet. So I apologise unreservedly and publicly to Ms Nicholls....

His blunder was apparently the result of his having fallen asleep in the middle of the play, which I assume is a common West End malady, much like heading to the exits in the seventh inning is at Dodger Stadium. And of course, some of the responsibility for that snafu has to be shouldered by Phoebe Nicholls, an actress of such refined skill and classic beauty that she possesses the power to cloud the minds of even the most hardened critic into confusing filial devotion with marital ennui. Nevertheless, I may be making a quick, post-election trip to London to see Waste, so long as I can find lodging of some sort; before I die, I have to see the Phoenician on stage at least once.

Ad of the Year:



link via Andrew Sullivan

The Dowd Report: Christendom's most obnoxious corporate lawyer weighs in on behalf of his client, the Senior Senator from Arizona, in a letter to the editor of the New York Times:

I am advised that you have assigned two of your top reporters to spend an extensive amount of time in Arizona and around the country investigating Cindy (McCain)'s life including her charity, her addiction and her marriage to Senator McCain. None of these subjects are news.

(snip)

These allegations and efforts to hurt Cindy have been a matter of public record for sixteen years. Cindy has been quite open and frank anbert her issues for all these years. Any further attempts to harass and injure based on the information from Gosinski and Clark will be met with an appropriate response. While she may be in the public eye, she is not public property nor the property of the press to abuse and defame.

It is worth noting that you have not employed your investigative assets looking into Michelle Obama. You have not tried to find Barack Obama’s drug dealer that he wrote about in his book, Dreams of My Father. Nor have you interviewed his poor relatives in Kenya and determined why Barack Obama has not rescured them. Thus there is a terrific lack of balance here.

The reference to Obama's "poor relatives in Kenya" is a nice touch. This is the same John Dowd who spent a good deal of the late-eighties conducting a fatwa against Pete Rose, investigating his private life over a subject that had a good deal less importance than the behavior of the life-partner of a potential future President. More recently, Dowd had a very different attitude when it came to the private life of past and present major league baseball players.

So stay classy, John.

The '56 Conundrum: In every close Presidential election, some notice is usually paid to the uncanny record of Missouri in picking the winning candidate. Since 1900, the Show Me State has backed the next President in all but one election, with the exception being the narrow vote for Adlai Stevenson over Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. With its location, just about dead-center of the country, and its urban-rural split, it should be inevitable that it would play such a role historically.

But the one thing that never gets explained is what the hell happened in '56. Why did Adlai Stevenson, who was essentially a sacrificial lamb going up against perhaps the most popular man of the 20th Century, who failed to win any other electoral votes outside the Deep South (and even there, he did poorly for a pre-Civil Rights Era Democratic nominee, losing Louisiana, Florida, and Texas, as well as several border states), capture the state that year, when he failed to do so four years earlier, when he ran a more competitive campaign?

In the context of this election, it is usually pointed out that Stevenson, like Obama, was a popular politician from the neighboring state of Illinois. But in '52, Stevenson was an incumbent governor, whereas in '56, he had been out of office for four years, with no recent record to allure Missouri voters. And Stevenson was crushed both times in his home state. Do you think there's any chance Obama will do worse in Illinois than he does in Missouri this time around?

And it wasn't as if some local trend was pushing Missouri into the Democratic column at that time. Four years later, the state went for JFK, but by a margin barely greater than Stevenson's win in '56; in other words, it went back to reflecting the national mood.

So what was it? Was there some local issue in Missouri that swung the ultimate Swing State towards the Man from Libertyville in a year when he was losing by 20 points to Ike everywhere else? Did they feel some degree of kinship to former corporate lawyers from Chicago? Or did they just wake up on election morning and decide they liked the only Presidential nominee in history to have been born in Los Angeles? Your guess is as good as mine....

Where we were eight years ago: The last time two non-incumbants battled for the Presidency, Bush had a lead similar to the margin now enjoyed by Obama. Of course, Gore not only closed the gap, he won the popular vote, and only through some legal machinations in the Supreme Court was Bush able to hoist the Presidency.

A couple of points should be made from reviewing those numbers. Bush had a much larger lead throughout the summer than Obama had, but like Obama, lost all of it and then some after the other party's convention. Without a market crash or a boneheaded Veep pick, Gore maintained the lead through early October, when a series of poor debate performances allowed Bush to surge into the lead.

Second, the perception that Bush was headed into a decisive victory seems to have been shaped by two really awful tracking polls, by USA Today-Gallup and by an outfit called Voter.com. Both gave the Texas Governor sizeable, double-digit leads, while other polling outfits showed a much closer race. Voter.com doesn't seem to have done much more damage to the Republic since 2000, but USA Today-Gallup has been the consistent outlier showing a dead-even race this time. [link via Volokh]

Bigots for Barack: It's mostly anecdotal, but Politico has an interesting piece on a trend involving an oft-misunderstood group of swing voters. In the end, I still doubt Obama will capture a majority of those voters....

Although I agree, generally, with Prof. Warren's advocacy against the 2005 BARF Act, there seems to be a real world perspective missing from her analysis, at least as it applies to the actual practice of bankruptcy law, that causes a blind spot in her writing. Here, she seems to argue that the 2005 law has exacerbated the meltdown of the housing market by making it harder for debtors to file Chapter 7, which enables a person to get a quick discharge of his unsecured debts (ie., credit cards).

I haven't seen much a decline, frankly; most of the people who want to file under Chapter 7 do so anyway, even if their income exceeds the state median, and most of the potential clients I meet who happen to own homes are looking to do a Chapter 13 repayment, not a straight Chapter 7. The reason why there was an initial precipitous decline in bankruptcy filings was due to the YBK panic on the eve of the new law in October, 2005. Everyone who ever thought about filing bankruptcy did so because they were led to believe that the new law would handicap them at the expense of their creditors. If anything impacted the currect credit crunch, it was the panic caused by the pending new law causing tens of thousands of people to file bankruptcy, and discharge debt, at the same time, not that those people can't file Chapter 7 cases now.

Of course, debtors have to jump through more hoops nowadays, thanks to the new law. If a filer's income exceeds the state median income, he is viewed as having presumptively filed in bad faith, which typically means...nothing. In some instances, the attorney will be sent an audit letter from the US Trustee, requiring him to produce certain financial statements and tax returns, as well as justifying certain monthly expenditures. But in most cases, debtors who make more than the median income who need to file Chapter 7 don't have a surplus income, once reasonable expenses are taken into account, and the present-day nightmare of skyrocketing adjustable rate mortgages is making the whole issue moot. According to the local US Trustee, less than one percent of all Chapter 7 filings that fall into this category are ultimately dismissed.

Moreover, Chapter 13 cases have become more routine, in large part because it is a more effective way to deal with secured debt, such as mortgages and car payments. Under Chapter 13, if the value of the home is less than the amount owed on the first trust deed, all deeds of trust that are junior to the first can be treated as unsecured debts, and potentially discharged completely at the end of the plan. Where I practice, this can be done with little more than a motion to the court seeking declaratory relief as to the value of the property; at a time when the housing market has been in free fall, such motions are infrequently opposed by lenders.

And that aspect of bankruptcy was unaffected by the passage of the 2005 BARF Act. That law has proved nothing more than an inconvenience to the experienced practitioner, since it only tangentially impacts a fraction of cases. In large part, that is due to the fact that it was drafted by lobbyists for the credit card industry, not attorneys with actual hands-on experience in the trenches of consumer bankruptcy.

Sure, there are more forms to fill out, but almost every practitioner has electronic forms that can be prepared within minutes. Potential filers have to take a pre-petition credit counseling course, but this step has proved to be ineffectual at providing debtors with non-bankruptcy alternatives, and the suspicion that many of these outfits have a conflict of interest in remaining on the good side of consumer attorneys is not unwarranted. And due to incompetent drafting, some of the more worthwhile provisions of the 2005 legislation, such as the attempt to terminate the automatic stay for repeat filers (which has proved to be illusory in Chapter 7 cases, since the law only halts the stay against debtors, not against the estate itself, which means that creditors still have to waste time seeking judicial relief), have been nullified.

The big winners of the 2005 BARF act, were, not surprisingly, bankruptcy lawyers. Its convoluted provisions took what was one of the few areas of the law that a smart, cost-conscious layperson could do by himself, and necessitated the hiring of licensed professionals at a much higher cost (try to fill out a Statement of Current Monthly Income at home if you don't believe me). And as I noted above, it hasn't done much to stem abusive filings, or check any of the shady abuses that existed before. But one thing the 2005 law didn't do was change how people could use Chapter 7 filings to save their homes, since it simply isn't an effective legal strategy, either before or after the law went into effect.

L.A. Is Burning: In fact, the fire shown here is about seven miles from my office, in the same vicinity as that train collision last month that killed several dozen. If you don't have to be outdoors for any reason, stay inside....

It seems I was the only sentient person in the blogosphere who blew off the Veep debate last night (I saw the Dodger playoff game at the local tavern instead), so all this talk about whether Gov. Palin exceeded the low expectations given her means little to me. In fact, televised campaign debates aren't that meaningful to me, insofar as I made up my mind on whom to vote for in this election as soon as the Democratic nominee was determined. As a partisan, it is unlikely I would be swayed by anything McCain or Palin might argue in one of these staged debates, so the only purpose to watch one of these things is to see if someone screws up, which I guess isn't much different from people who watch Formula 1 or NASCAR because of the possibility someone might crash. I just have better things to do.

Still, this bit of spin is pretty lame, even by the standards of modern political campaigns. No wonder McCain has lost ten points to Obama in two weeks.

Best Title of a Blogpost Ever: "The Successful Failure of the Angels' Strategy" by Matt Welch, who's spinning the Halos' tenth straight playoff loss (yawn) to the Boston Red Sox the way Reason Mag has been spinning the failure of free market policies on Wall Street the past two weeks. Give it up, Matt: '02 was a fluke, and the Rally Monkey is as dead as Dale Earnhardt !!!