grading my 2011 predictions

one year ago, i posted 22 predictions for 2011. wanna see how naive and foolish i was back then? i do too. so here goes.

1. president obama's approval ratings will be roughly the same (within the margin of error) on december 31, 2011 as they were on december 31, 2010 (for the purposes of measuring success in this prediction, i will use the gallup daily presidential job approval poll and for the december 31st number i will use the 3 day average for december 28-30).

wrong. there is no december 28-30 number for 2010 or 2011 (probably because of the holiday). so instead i will use the last poll available that takes place entirely in december of each year. in the dec. 27-29, 2010 poll obama had a 47% approval. the dec. 27-29, 2011 poll has a 43% approval. it's a +/-3% poll, so i just missed. d'oh!

2. iran will not develop a nuclear weapon in 2011.

right. the "iran is only a few months away from having nukes!" hysteria is pretty constant. and yet, we never seem to cross those few months.

3. neither israel nor the u.s. will launch a military strike against iran in 2011.

right. another thing that people keep claiming will happen soon, but it never seems to actually happen.

4. the republican party will still have no clear front-runner candidate to run against obama by the end of 2011.

right. surprise! the republican candidates turned out to be exactly the assortment of clowns they looked like they would be at the end of last year. and republican poll respondents turned out to be just as unsure over which clown to pick as i thought they would be.

5. by the end of 2011, there will be no serious primary challenger to obama (and by serious, i mean getting more than 10% support nationally in polls of likely democratic primary voters).

right. forget about 10%. i don't think there's anyone who is being polled at all.

6. the affordable care act will not be repealed in 2011.

right. notwithstanding promises made in the republican surge campaign of 2010, repealing major legislation is hard to do.

7. the supreme court will agree to review the constitutionality of the individual mandate in the ACA.

right, and with 5.5 hours of argument too.

8. there will be no palestinian-israeli peace deal in 2011.

right. a shocker, i know.

9. hamas will still control the gaza strip at the end of 2011.

right. i realize the status quo can't continue forever. but predicting that nothing will happen with the israeli-palestinian conflict has got to be the low-hanging fruit of the annual prediction game.

10. israel will continue to expand settlements on the west bank in 2011 and will not agree to any more moratoriums during that year.

right. yep, more low-hanging fruit. it was pretty clear that the ten month loophole-ridden moratorium of 2009-2010 was a one-time thing.

11. osama bin laden and ayman zawahiri will still be "at large" on december 31, 2011. [aside: i make this prediction every year. why stop when i got a winner?]

half wrong/half right. that's why i should have stopped.i'm only getting this half right is because zawahiri is still at large.

12. the u.s. will comply with the timetable to withdraw its forces from iraq. that is, there will be no u.s. soldiers in iraq by the end of 2011 (except for the usual marine contingent that guards the embassy).

right. this one i actually think i have something to crow about. almost unanimously the bloggers behind the blogs i regularly read thought it would not happen. it did.

13. more u.s. soldiers will die in afghanistan in 2011 than did in 2010.

wrong. i'm happy to be wrong about this one. according to iCasualties, 499 u.s. soldiers died in afghanistan in 2010 and 417 died there in 2011. of course, any number is too many, and 417 is still more than an average of one per day. how can that possibly be worth it?

14. the u.s. and russia will negotiate a treaty concerning tactical nuclear weapons in 2011, but it will not be ratified by the u.s. senate by the end of the year.

wrong. the negotiations stalemated fairly early in the year and were never completed. it never got close enough to the senate for them to drag their feet on ratifying it.

15. at least one more u.s. state will legalize gay marriage in 2011 (i'm not guessing which one).

right. yay new york!

16. obama will have a budget show-down with the GOP in congress and the government will shut down.

i'm going to call this wrong. there were more show-downs than i ever would have thought, but no shut down.

17. by the end of december 2011, sarah palin will still be in national news on a regular basis despite having no reasonable chance of ever holding any elected office again.

right. (one quickly googled-up example from today) i think we're going to have to put up with the palin-obsession for the rest of her life.

18. wikileaks will release all 251,287 of the diplomatic cables it has by the end of 2011.

right, although it happened in a much less controlled way than i would have predicted--the guardian accidentally published the password that allowed access to all the files, so the unredacted files all leaked out before wikileaks was done redacting, at which time the organization decided to just bow to reality and officially release everything.

19. either wikileaks will still exist at the end of 2011, or some successor organization that does essentially the same thing will exist (the successor could be openleaks, or it could be something else like it).

i'm going to count this wrong, even though it is technically right. wikileaks still exists, but has, at least for now, ceased to do very much. openleaks still exists, but hasn't really done much. so while i got the letter of the prediction is right, the spirit of the prediction turned out to be wrong.

20. the unemployment rate will be better by the end of 2011 than it is at the end of 2010, but unemployment will still be over 8%.

right. according to this site, the unemployment rate at the end of 2010 was 9.4%. at the end of november 2011 (the last month for which there is data right now), it was 8.6%. (i know there are several different measures of unemployment. the site uses the bureau of labor standard's employment situation summary, which is comes from the data from the BLS's household survey and establishment survey).

21. southern sudan (or whatever they decide to call it) will either not be independent or will be claiming independence and at war with the khartoum-based government.

wrong. ROSS (at least that's what i decided to call it), is currently independent and not at war with khartoum, although there is arguably a proxy war over south kordufan in what is now southern sudan, along the sudanese-ROSS border. despite that and other sometimes violent differences between the two sudans, despite what others may call it the two countries are not officially at war and sudan does actually recognize ROSS. the recognition issue was really what i was getting at when i made my prediction.

i might also add that i changed my mind about this prediction just days into 2011. but i'm stuck with the predictions i make before the year changes. so i'm still counting this one as wrong.

22. the only trip i will take outside of the u.s. in 2011 will be to canada.

right! i'm trying to decide whether to risk predicting any foreign trips in 2012.

15.5 correct out of 22, or 70.455% right. that is a little better than i did in 2009 (65.909% right), but a lot worse than i did in 2008 (83.333%). (i never got around to doing predictions for 2010).

while my percentages are never that bad, many of the predictions i make are pretty safe. i'm not willing to commit them to the blog post unless i feel pretty sure of myself. on the other hand, at least one of those "safe" predictions (the prediction that bin laden would remain "at large") turned out to be definitively wrong. and, of course, i completely missed most of the stories that 2011 will go down in history for, things like the arab spring and the fukushima disaster. my predictions are mostly projections of current trends or factors that i could already see at the end of 2010. there was nothing in the news that would alert anyone to the earthquake that led to the tsunami and then meltdown at fukushima. and while the protests in tunisia had already begun by the end of 2010, i don't think anyone thought the phenomenon would spread as far as it has at that point.

in any event, i'll try to post my no doubt flawed predictions for 2012 soon. then again, that's what i promised to do for my 2010 predictions, but i never did. so take that prediction with a grain of salt.

december 30

yesterday (or maybe today) samoa moved from one side of the international date line to the other. on that island december 30, 2011 never happened and december 29th slid right on over to december 31st. presumably they chose that date because they wanted the change to become effective with the new year, but they didn't want to erase the new year's holiday in the process.

so why didn't they just wait two months and make the skip happen at the end of february? 2012 is a leap year, so they could skip february 29th. a december 30th will probably be missed a lot more than a february 29th. the latter doesn't happen most years, so most people are used to a 28 day february anyway.

not that anyone asked me. it just seems like there's a convenient day to skip coming in the near future. i wonder why no one thought to use that when they made the switch.

on resolutions

i usually keep my new year's resolutions. most people don't. i'm convinced that my success has less to do with my willpower than they way that i come up with my resolutions. and so, by request of no one, here are my thoughts on getting a good new year's resolution.

the typical new years resolutions is something like "i will lose x pounds" or "i will finally finish reading that book.'" the problem with those resolutions is they are goal-oriented. personally, i think that is a mistake. the resolution should not be about the goal, it should be about the process to reach that goal.

the ideal resolution is two things: (a) it should improve the resolver's life somehow, and (b) it should be achievable. too many people focus on (a) rather than (b). by focusing on how the resolution will be achieved, i find, i am much better at keeping them. goals are aspirational. but they don't tell you what to do on a day-by-day, moment-by-moment basis. but that is how we live our lives. to be achievable, you need to focus on what you're supposed to do, not where you want to end up.

so instead of coming up with a goal-oriented resolution, i suggest coming up with a process-oriented resolution. rather than defining the resolution as the goal of what you want to accomplish, come up with a plausible plan and then make that plan the resolution. so instead of "i will lose x pounds", make it, "i will stop eating x" or "i will spend x time on the treadmill".

that doesn't mean you have to make yourself an easy resolution. it's more about just being realistic. my resolutions are always about process. for 2011, for example, i told people i was resolving to become a chocolate snob. but really i was resolving to not eat non-fancy chocolate for the duration of the year. that's what i mean by process oriented. if i had left it at "i will eat better chocolate", i don't think it would have worked as well because it is endlessly debatable whether my overall chocolate consumption is better or worse than in 2010. knowing that i am not allowed to eat M&Ms, hershey bars, or any chocolate that doesn't have a percentage of cacao printed on the wrapper is easy to apply on moment-by-moment basis.

i've also developed a short list of principles i try to keep in mind when i craft an achievable resolution:

(1) keep it as simple as possible. it's easier to follow 1-3 lines of instructions than a whole paragraph.

(2) resolving to not do something is easier than resolving to do something. for whatever reason i am a lot less motivated to do something i don't otherwise want to do than to swear off something i like.

(3) the terms of the resolution have to be clearly defined. judgment calls just gives me wiggle room for cheating. the problem is that spelling out concrete boundaries and plugging loopholes make the resolution more complicated, which conflicts with principle #1.

(4) the resolution should expire. resolutions are experiments. when i make them up, i can't be sure whether i will like the result, so it is better if the resolution only lasts for a limited duration. also having a light at the end of the tunnel is a better motivator to follow the rules than if i'm telling myself this is what i have to do for the rest of my life. give yourself a date when the resolution ends. that's a chance to look back at how it went and decide whether you want to keep doing it after that. typically, my resolutions are one year long, with an option to renew after that.

actually, my resolutions rarely follow all four principles. but they are something i try to keep in mind when i do my resolving.

дед мороз > santa claus

it's hard to argue with this. sorry santa...

spreading santorum across iowa

check out this average of polls for iowa. the yellow line is the only one with a clear upswing. could this finally be the long-promised santorum surge?

this is what youtube is for

watching a bunch of americans rap in a language they don't know.



the song title, "men kazakhpyn", means "i am kazakh". which i guess is what makes it extra funny.

people singing "men kazakhpyn" seems to have replaced "qara zhorga" dance videos as the current kazakh youtube fad.

catholic bishops hate gays more than they care about children

how exactly did the catholic church, which on paper at least is about a whole variety of issues, become little more than an anti-abortion/anti-gay organization in this country? i don't get it. the church has all kinds of stances about things like income inequality, social justice, the death penalty, labor rights, aid to the poor, etc. but these days if i see an article about the catholic church in the u.s., i know it will be either about opposition to abortion or fag-bashing (or pedophilia).

on the one hand, this is none of my business. i'm not catholic. catholic believers can emphasize whatever doctrine they want.

at the same time, as an outsider i am puzzled by american catholic leaders' choices. they are de-emphasizing all of the stuff that i actually respect about the church in favor of two issues that place them on the rightwing fringe of american politics. as the culture increasingly accepts gays, why would anyone respect an organization that is willing to screw over countless children, denying them an adoptive or foster family, just so that it won't have to treat a minority of those families that involve gay people equally? i realize that bishops may not think in these terms, but from a purely marketing standpoint it doesn't make any sense. it certainly makes me think that the church doesn't care that much about the well-being of children.

observers back to being useless

so much for that theory.

observer missions

i was a little suspicious whether observer missions like the arab league's current one in syria do any good anymore. in ye olden tymes, observer missions had value even if they didn't do anything but show up and report what they saw. that's because the missions would place outside eyes in a troubled region, threatening to tell the world if they found anything nasty and thus deterring regimes from doing nasty things. but these days ubiquitous video recorders plus youtube mean that outside eyes are always potentially present. the deterrence of being observed is already in the troubled regions of the world. so do observer missions still add any deterrent value?

apparently, yes. i guess the arab leagues mission brings attention as much as outside eyes. that's the added deterrent value. at least until the world media gets bored with this and the attention drains away.

the NAU is coming for you

what i've never understood about north american union-based conspiracy theories, is why a single country comprised of a merged u.s., canada and mexico would be so scary. obviously, if the resulting country were an oppressive dictatorship, that would be scary. but that's because i don't want to live under a dictatorship, not because the geography would include places that are currently in mexico and canada. i equally don't want to live under a dictatorship whose borders are limited to the current 50 states. similarly, if the u.s., canada, and mexico were to become a single country and that country ended up being a place with a democratic government and economic prosperity, i would be happy to live there.

the bottom line is i don't want to live under a dictatorship or an impoverished country no matter what georgraphic territory it includes. so if you're going to dream up a scary conspiracy theory, why not just have it be about poverty or political oppression? there's really no need to bring borders into the mix. i just don't find different borders by themselves all that frightening.

that is also how i feel about those one-world government conspiracy theories.

be careful what you wish for

good news for ron paul: with possibility that he might win in iowa, the media is finally starting to pay serious attention to him.

bad news for ron paul: the media is finally starting to pay serious attention to him.

forcing toddlers to go without medical care to protect the investor class

more and more i am seeing the debt crisis in europe as a relatively straightforward wealth transfer. investors bet on the greek economy (i.e. bought greek bonds) and lost. rather than take their losses, the political system is coming to their aid and are forcing other people to pay for the investor's mistake. no default will happen, investors will get the full returns for the bonds they bought, and diabetic three year olds will go without insulin.

it's the new ethic: big investors never bear the consequences of their own actions. innocent third parties do.

hey, i hear it's some kind of holiday

and the clown car rolls on

assuming they follow the letter of the law, only mittens and paul will be on the virginia primary ballot. personally, i have my doubts whether VA will resist the pressure to change the rules given that several so-called "major" candidates didn't qualify.

atrios suggests that this means the candidates who didn't qualify aren't really serious about running for president. but i think it's more a symptom of how the republican party has found an an exceptional assortment of incompetent boobs this election season.

ten thousand deserters

is this report true? if so, could this be the tipping point for the assad regime?

signing statement

what a crock.

just a few years ago, liberals were dinging president bush for using signing statements to justify ignoring laws he didn't like. bush's defenders noted that signing statements had been used for years by prior presidents, including democrats, without a peep from bush's liberal critics. the critics replied by noting that bush's signing statements were different than the statements of his predecessors. unlike prior signing statements that would explain the president's understanding of what the law meant, bush was claiming the ability to ignore statutory provisions completely, effectively using them like a line-item veto without a congressional override.

it remains to be seen what kind of signing statement obama will issue in this case. but in order to alleviate the problems with the detention provisions of the NDAA, he's going to have to overrule express provisions of the bill. in other words, to make it less offensive, he would have to do exactly what liberals like me criticized president bush for doing.

even if i could accept the use of a signing statement in this case, obama's signing statement won't really fix the problem. if presidential opinion can overrule a provision of the law, then obama's interpretation could be easily overruled with a reinterpretation by some future president. so even if obama words the statement just right to present abuse, there's no guarantee that his successors won't come up with their own, more expansive, interpretation of the law.

even worse, using a signing statement might actually make it more likely for abuse of the law to occur. once obama signs the NDAA our best hope is for the courts to strike down the detention provisions as a violation of due process. a signing statement that smooths over the rough edges of this legislation will be used by defenders of the law in the inevitable court challenge, perhaps making it more likely for a court to find it constitutional.

you say malvinas, i say you highness

hey, look at that! i guess the iron lady didn't settle that falkland conflict after all.

actually, looking back it strikes me as a prey strange little war. i think to the extent i took a side back then, i was vaguely pro-british, the UK being automatically deemed the good guys in every conflict since 1813. but in retrospect, it really is quite strange that they would go through such great lengths to hold on to those islands.

it's that most wonderful time if the year

the time that i realize that i need X number of CLE credits before the end of the year or i will lose my law license. i'm spending the whole day today being lectured at about ethics.

the sad thing is that even with a whole day of being lectured at, i still won't quite have enough credits for the year. so i also have to get an hour or two online at some point within the next ten days.

in any case, i'm in for six different ethics lectures today, each by speakers trying desperately to be relevant and entertaining to the assorted crowd of jaded lawyers who just want their fucking credits. first up, "bob dylan and the art of taking legal ethics seriously." seriously.

maybe i will post more when i get to lecture number 4: "social media for lawyers: darned if you do, darned if you don't." why not post? it sounds like i am darned either way.

supervillain or newt?

with everyone piling on gingrich, why should this site be left out? i give you: supervillain or newt?

i got a 70%. see if you can beat my score.

who can fill their crazy shoes?

a few years ago, if you had asked me which world leaders i thought were actually crazy, as in mentally ill, i would have listed three: turkmenbashi, kim jung il, and moammar qadhafi. now they're all gone.

yes, i think it is really over

for a while i was spilling more electrons here about the iraq war than anything else. so i guess it's worth noting the end.

meanwhile, i have seen a lot of people say this really isn't the end; that because u.s. contractors remain in the country, "the iraq war", or at least american involvement in it, really isn't over.

and there is something to that. for a war that has been declared over several times already, it makes sense to take these announcements with a grain of salt. for a war that involved an unprecedented reliance on "private contractors" to do tasks that formerly were done by soldiers in the u.s. military, including the fighting itself, the presence of contractors in the country does raise questions about whether the pullout is real.

on the other hand, the state department employs private contractors for a variety of services, including security, all over the world, including a ton of countries that no one thinks the u.s. is currently involved in a war in. the mere presence of contractors doesn't prove that the american withdrawal is fake. and yet, presence alone seems to be the entire argument of those who claim the pullout isn't real.

maybe it is also the sheer number of contractors. the u.s. is employing a lot more contractors in iraq than it is anywhere else, including a lot of security contractors. but that large number can be explained by the following three things: (1) iraq is still pretty dangerous, (2) the state department and USAID have a lot of development projects in iraq, and (3) the u.s. is not willing to shut down those projects for security reasons. if any other country in the world got as dangerous as iraq, the u.s. would probably scale down its operations in the country, suspend its various projects for security reasons and evacuate all non-essential personnel from the embassy and consulates. but the u.s. didn't wreck other countries the way that it wrecked iraq. for political reasons, the u.s. is not willing to stop its development projects because that would mean the u.s. is leaving behind a mess rather than a work-in-progress. as long as iraq remains a fixer-upper, we can all sleep more soundly secure in our belief that we didn't completely trash what was already pretty messed up place.

that's why there are so many contractors in the country. and that is why i do not think their presence means the war is not really over. of course, if contractors start raiding houses, or going on the offense against militants, i would change my mind. so far, at least, there doesn't seem to be any indication that is what they are doing.

maybe the hooligans are just trying to become stars in the next viral video

the six-month old strike in western kazakhstan has turned violent after strikers started making political demands, which prompted a police crackdown and a riot by protesters. the government is blaming the violence on "hooligans" and is imposing a 3-week "state of emergency" on the western kazakhstani town which will allow the government "to prohibit audio and video recording."

how exactly does prohibiting audio and video recording stop "hooliganism"? it makes no sense. if the government wants to abuse protesters without anyone filming them, they should at least come up with a less laughable cover story.

my annual echo bitch (last one, really, i mean it this time!)

why are my echo comments in reverse order all of a sudden? does anyone know how to fix it? [never mind! i should have looked at my archives before i asked. apparently echo pulls this shit every year]

this was the year i was finally going to ditch this comment system by not paying the annual fee. yeah, i know i always say that. so realistically, i knew i might not ever get around to it.

then i got an email the other day that my credit card was automatically charged for the 2012 fee. i don't remember ever authorizing that. it was probably buried in the "terms of service" i clicked through when i paid last year. so now i'm determined to ditch these fuckers.

if anyone can suggest an alternative comment system, i'm all eyes. the key point is i want to be able to export all the existing comments to the new system and have them end up associated with the original post. i'm hoping that isn't too much to ask. it also would be nice if it was free. but i'll settle for anything i don't hate as much as echo.

20 (25) 1 (2)

as kakatown celebrates its bidecennial (and quarter-century anniversary of the zheltoqsan massacre), we are celebrating the first anniversary of noz jr's homecoming day (and the second anniversary of our leaving-without-a-clue-of-what-we-were-getting-into day).

but tomorrow, we will do the bidecennial. they are having a thingy at upenn. said thingy is open to the public, so local philly pholks are welcome to show up too.

my god it's full of caves

caves! caves, everywhere!

i guess i should console myself that the democrats managed to not cave for about a week before they started caving now. so they beat the spread! i'm sure that will make me slightly happier when the military comes to detain me indefinitely.

...and everyone should read charlie pierce's post.

the murdock primary

fox news really doesn't like mittens.

news from the front

noz jr's daycare is having a "winter festival" party this afternoon. another victory in the glorious war against christmas!

pass the popcorn

so basically, gingrich is arguing that while he might be an asshole for taking $1.6 million dollars from freddy mac when he has said that people who took money from that organization should be thrown in jail, romney is a just-as-big-or-bigger asshole for all the money he made acquiring companies and firing a bunch of employees, and then trying to pretend that experience taught him something about job creation.

can't everyone just agree that they are both right? let's all join hands and recognize that both newt and mitt are gigantic assholes. but is that a feature of a bug? sometimes i think the biggest asshole is exactly what the republican party faithful are looking for. being a total dick at all the debates seems to have helped propel newt to the top.

two mitt romneys

the NYTimes runs a puff piece about how mitten, while being filthy rich, doesn't casually toss his filth around, the morning after mittens casually offers to bet rick perry $10,000 on national tv.

all nationalities are made up and yet national aspiration is real

putting aside the palestinians well-justified (IMHO) concerns, why does it matter whether a nationality is "invented" or not?

i mean, they are all "invented", aren't they? nationality is a purely human construction. at some point a group of people decide that they are different from those barbarians over there and so they give themselves a name that they can all identify with. some nationalities might date back further in history, but i don't see how that makes them any less real. i'm sure when king george heard about the american declaration of independence his response wasn't: "'americans?' that's not a nationality! i never heard of it before now, so they can't be independent." or maybe that is what he said. (and no doubt newt the lobbyist historian will be willing to tell me otherwise in the most pompous tone he can muster). but it wouldn't matter if king george did say that. the issues raised by the colonists when they declared independence has nothing to do with the issue of whether anyone had bothered to consider them a nationality before. that's simply not what their declaration was about.

there are tons of countries that exist today that didn't exist in 1947. that fact doesn't make the national identity of the people in those countries any less real. most countries of africa and many in asia became independent only after world war two. would president gingrich withdraw his recognition from all of them?

it's not like newt made up the "historically there are no palestinians" line. but the line, even if it were true, is not an argument, it's a dodge. what people did or did not call themselves 70 or 100 years ago has no relevance to any of the current issues in the conflict.

rubber hose health tip

avoid castrating lambs with your teeth. use someone else's teeth! or maybe a knife or something.

you heard it here, um, second!

everything is AAA except the people who aren't making bets

i've been thinking along those same lines. if no country is ever allowed to default no matter what, even if it means strangling its own economy and impoverishing its citizens to avoid it, then why doesn't every government bond have a AAA rating? investors have no risk, only the pensioners and other citizens of the bet-upon country do. the system lets investors make bets on economies that they are 100% guaranteed to win, with all of the negative consequences falling on a random bunch of ordinary people who didn't agree to gamble anything.

america's punching bag in tehran

a small detail in the drone wars:

Iran also said it had formally protested what it said was the drone’s violation of Iranian airspace. Because Iran and the United States have no direct diplomatic relations, Iran summoned the ambassador from Switzerland, which manages American interests in Iran.

i wonder how often the swiss ambassador gets summoned by the iranian government to be yelled at for something the u.s. did. she probably hates it. who wouldn't get tired of getting shit for some other country's actions. "just once, can you yell at me for something about switzerland?" she probably asks. but the iranians just want to complain about countries like the US, UK and zionist entity. i bet she misses qadhafi.

the walrus and the newt

i think this is just newt's attempt to compete in the pam atlas primary.

of course, newt fucked it all up, both by forgetting to ask bolton ahead of time and by possibly breaking federal law in making the announcement.

UPDATE: good news for newt! he won't be going to jail after all (or at least he won't for the Bolton announcement). also good news for the rest of us, as newt's campaign won't prematurely derail before it reaches its full entertainment potential.

the inevitable nominee strategy

why do politicians ever go with the strategy of presenting themselves as the inevitable nominee? that was the cornerstone of the romney campaign and now he is being forced to do something else as newt gingrich is making it clear that he is far from inevitable. four years ago, the clinton campaign also presented itself as the inevitable nominee, and then had to retool itself when barack obama took the lead.

has there ever been a non-incumbent presidential candidate who succeeded using the "inevitable" strategy in the modern primary system? that system was created to end the practice of choosing candidates in backroom deals among party elites because the rank-and-file party members felt that they did not have a say in the process. so why would anyone think that a message of "whether you want me or not, i am going to be the nominee" is appealing to voters? aren't campaign strategists aware that people often rebel if they feel like they have no choice? the primary system is a product of just such a rebellion!

it just seems like a really bad strategy. and yet, in the last two presidential elections at least, that is what the presumed early front runners went with.

just to be clear: i still think that mitt will be the nominee. but he's going to have to ditch is inevitability thing first to get there, just as hillary clinton ditched her inevitability last time around and found some success when she started portraying obama as the one who was being anointed-by-party-bigwigs. it is only then that her supporters became really energized. so why did romney bother using the same failed strategy this time around?

my morning of flem

this article mentions that the new belgian prime minister took his oath of office in "French, Dutch and Flemish" which confused me because i thought that flemish was the dialect of dutch that is spoken in belgium. but if that's all it is, then by saying he took the oath in flemish and dutch, wouldn't that mean that he took it in the dialect of dutch spoken in belgium and the dialect of dutch spoken in the netherlands? so why would the belgian prime minister take the belgian oath of office in a dialect that is not the one spoken in belgium?

i looked into it and of course things are a bit more complicated than i thought. and now it's even less clear to me what languages that new prime minister was speaking when he did the "dutch" oath and the "flemish" oath because the english word "flemish" can refer to four different (if closely related) dialects/languages: "belgian dutch", "east flemish", "west flemish", and "french flemish". all four are dialects of dutch. he probably didn't utter the oath in french flemish, since its speakers seem to live in france rather than belgium. but otherwise my best guess is that minister-president di rupo did the oath in two of the three others, plus french, but not german. 

um, why did i spend that much time on this again?

the secret of newt's success

i'm not saying anything new here, but the reason that newt is getting his surge is because he is perceived by the republican electorate as being strongly disliked by liberals.

that's it. it's not because they agree with his views on issues any more than any of the others. it's not because they are looking for an "intellectual" to lead them after experiencing a parade of dunces. it's because they think people like me don't like him. and they also seem to think that people like me not liking him makes him more electable.

which is awesome. because i think they are wrong on both counts. while i think newt would make a disastrous president (and let's face it, they all would), he also makes a disastrous candidate. and that significantly increases the entertainment value of this whole race--both because of newt's shenanigans and because it means i have little actual fear of a president gingrich coming out of it at the end.

but keep it quiet. because if the teatards find out that people like me actually have a secret crush on the gingrich, they might jump ship for someone else.

not gonna happen

on its merits, i believe that former president bush should be arrested for the torture he ordered. but unless the u.s. ceases to be a super-power during bush's lifetime, it will never happen.

if, for example, zambia had heeded amnesty international's call, can you imagine the resulting shitstorm? members of congress would be introducing legislation to cut off all aid to that country, and demanding that president obama invade the country to rescue the former president. zambia would also jeopardize its close relationship with china, a country that would have a lot to worry about the precedent it would start. no international court has issued a warrant against W so zambia would have to try him itself, a trial that the country is probably completely unequipped to pursue. zambia would gain nothing from the arrest, and has everything to lose.

while i don't blame amnesty for publicly calling for bush's arrest. it makes a good point and AI is a human rights organization. it's purpose is to make good points. but realistically, no one should expect bush, or anyone else high up in the former administration, to ever answer for their crimes.

the descendants and the rule against perpetuities

i saw the descendants this afternoon and i believe it is the second major motion picture that uses the rule against perpetuities as a plot device. the RAP is infamous for torturing generations of law students, even though it won't ever come up in their post-law school careers for the vast majority of those tortured students.

anyway, the first RAP film is body heat. but that film got the rule wrong. "the descendants" doesn't quite give enough information to tell, but it is possible that it is consistent with the hawaiian version of the RAP. (the life in being would presumably be one of the people alive when matt king's ancestor who set up the trust died, and then that life in being person then died 14 years before the beginning of the film, giving the king family seven more years before the savings clause kicked in and dissolved the trust) which means that the alexander payne film may be the first to use the rule against perpetuities correctly as a plot device.

however, i could be wrong. law school was a long time ago and i haven't thought much about the RAP in a while. it hasn't yet come up in my post-law school career.

not a fan of jon, but at least he thinks the u.s. presidential race is more than a reality tv show

jon huntsman's rsvp after being invited to the trump debate:

Lol. We look forward to watching Mitt and Newt suck-up to The Donald with a big bowl of popcorn

in case you have any lingering questions whether the republican presidential primary is a total joke

trump!

the end of retail politics should mean the end of our fucked up primary system

if retail politics is dead, then there's no reason to give privileged positions during the primary/caucus season to low-population states like new hampshire and iowa.

the only coherent justification i have ever heard for giving the residents of those states more of a say in the choosing of the president than anyone else is that their small towns and low population keeps up ye olde style retail politics. you know, where candidates can do stuff like dress in overalls and eat pork rinds with regular salt-of-the-earth country folk. sure, it's a stupid over-idealized caricature of what the "real" america is, of questionable relevance to a much more diverse and urban country. but i could at least buy the idea that candidates talking one-on-one with ordinary people might be a good thing.

so if candidates have found a way to avoid the pork rinds and stick to scripted events safely within their campaign bubble, then why the hell are we still kissing up to NH and IA?

yes, it is everyday teenager (and older) language

i think the overreaction is a generational thing. "x sucks" has been a fairly common, if informal, way of expressing disapproval for most of my life. i remember using the phrase as far back as at least middle school, probably earlier. i still use it regularly in informal speech without much thought.

except that a few years ago i used it in front of my mother-in-law and discovered that she thinks the phrase is really crude. so i avoid using it around her. when my mother-in-law told me she didn't like it i asked her why, and she said "because of the sexual connotation," a connotation that had simply never occurred to me. that's probably because i had been saying things sucked since before i realized that sucking had anything to do with sex.

as for "x blows", i think that one is more recent. i don't remember hearing it before college. although i don't think of it as "potty-mouthed", my impression is that blowing is a little stronger than sucking. but maybe that's also a generational thing. i wouldn't be surprised if the kids today saw sucking and blowing as pretty equivalent.

(via atrios)

maybe the GOP bumped its head at some point

how did donald trump become the guy whose ring every republican presidential candidate has to kiss?

i realize trying to make sense of the modern republican party is a fool's errand, but why trump? there are other birthers out there. surely, there is at east one who isn't already on record being pro-choice and supporting a single payer health care system.

the modern republican party is a really strange entity. it's totally unforgiving for seemingly minor transgressions of the party orthodoxy. but then for certain people and issues, it's like the party has amnesia.

mmmm

finally, the path is wide-open for the beshparmak craze to sweep this nation.