Category: Politics

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Veeery interesting! By now everyone’s seen maps colored in red/blue by state, which make the vote look very regional (the South and Midwest pull red, and the northeast, the West Coast, and the Great Lakes area pull blue). A map by county makes the country look extremely red, until you realize that many of the blue counties are the more populous ones, highlighting the fact that the split is primarily urban/rural.

A Princeton professor has taken the election results and produced a shaded map by county, with a full red-purple-blue continuum. Looking at this map, it’s clear we’re a lot more integrated than we think we are.

Thumbnail of map

Hat tip: from a comment on peterdavid.net.

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Despite Bush’s appeal to Kerry supporters [in his acceptance speech], Cheney said the popular vote victory gave Bush a mandate and the Bush White House would continue pushing for the Republicans’ “clear agenda.”

Excuse me, but how the #@*! is a 51% victory a “mandate?”

In any other race, that would be called “barely squeaking by.”

Yes, it’s unusual for a presidential candidate to actually get more than 50% of the popular vote, but that still means 49% of the voters preferred someone else. If you broke a cookie in half, and got a 51%/48% split with 1% of crumbs, you wouldn’t notice the difference.

Last night there were state propositions hovering at around 53%/46%, and the LA Times thought they were too close to call. That kind of victory in a state race would never be considered a mandate, or a repudiation, etc. — it would have passed by the skin of its proverbial teeth. A 66% win? That would be a mandate. A 60% win? Maybe. But 51%? That’s a sign that you’d better look at what people wanted from your opponent, not a blank check to ignore half the population of the country.

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Perhaps you’ve heard of electoral-vote.com. Over the past few months, the site’s author has been collecting data from various polls and trying to predict which candidate is likely to carry each state. Each state’s support is classified as strong, weak, or barely there, or a straight tie, making it a more useful gauge than a simple red/blue map.

Yesterday’s data showed a strong win for Kerry, 298 electoral votes to 231. This morning it shows a virtual tie: 262 for Kerry, 261 for Bush.

This morning the “votemaster” also writes about dealing with a simultaneous denial-of-service attack and Slashdotting (or “flash crowd” as he prefers to call it), and he talked about his previous Slashdotting experience… with a rebuttal to claims that Linux was stolen from Minix.

Yes, the “votemaster” is none other than Andrew Tanenbaum, author of the MINIX operating system, one-time teacher of Linus Torvalds, and an interviewee for Samizdat, the Microsoft-funded study that attempted to prove that Linux couldn’t possibly have been developed honestly. Tanenbaum was disturbed by the leading questions, and incensed when his responses were taken out of context and used to support a position he categorically refuted. He and others posted rebuttals before the book even saw print, and by the time it was actually published, it was essentially a nonissue.

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One thing that always stuck in my head about government, way back to elementary school, was the idea of checks and balances. You see, our government was designed deliberately to prevent any one person or group from getting too much power and becoming a de facto monarch (or oligarch). For instance, Congress passes laws, but they don’t go into effect until the President signs them. The President is commander-in-chief of our armed forces, but only Congress can declare war. The House and Senate are designed with different representations so that neither the most populous nor the most numerous states can overwhelm the others.

This principle extends further. Competing businesses keep each other in check (word of the day: free market). Business and government keep each other in check through lobbyists and regulators. Conservatives and liberals, playing tug-of-war, should together keep us trying new things without completely losing track of the old things we should keep. This can usually be managed by having one party in charge of the White House and the other in charge of Congress. The last thing you want is for the extreme right or extreme left to control all branches of government. (We’ve seen what a conservative-controlled country is like over the last few years, and a lot of people don’t like it.)

So it was interesting to see J. Michael Straczynski (a.k.a. JMS), best known as the creator of Babylon 5, talking about the breakdown of civility in politics in terms of the breakdown of checks and balances. If you have 10 minutes to read this tonight — especially if you’re an American citizen of voting age — I recommend that you do. You may nod in agreement, or you may shake your head in disbelief, but it should at least make you think.

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For quite a while now, the always-excellent This Is True newsletter has been advertising writer Randy Cassingham’s latest (?) project: JumboJoke, a weblog-style daily joke post. I finally took a look at it, and thought I’d share the following pair of lists based on our political parties’ often contradictory platforms and rhetoric:

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I experienced a bit of cognitive dissonance earlier today. I was listening to a report on The World (PRI) about the bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta, and a reporter (Stephen McConnell) was explaining the Australian political situation for an American audience. (Why? They’ve got an election coming up in a month. Comparisons to the Madrid bombing should be obvious at this point.)

He explained, “It’s a two-horse race. You’ve got the conservatives, who in this country are called the Liberals, and then there’s the Labor Party, which would be much more aligned to something like the Democrats…”

It’s a lot more complicated, of course, but the idea of conservatives calling themselves liberals just seemed bizarre, considering that the terms are opposites here in the US. For all practical purposes, conservative and liberal are swear words when used by someone of the opposite ideology!