Month: October 2010

Kevin Drum waxes counterintuitive:

Back during World War II, the RAF lost a lot of planes to German anti-aircraft fire. So they decided to armor them up. But where to put the armor? The obvious answer was to look at planes that returned from missions, count up all the bullet holes in various places, and then put extra armor in the areas that attracted the most fire.

Obvious but wrong. As Hungarian-born mathematician Abraham Wald explained at the time, if a plane makes it back safely even though it has, say, a bunch of bullet holes in its wings, it means that bullet holes in the wings aren't very dangerous. What you really want to do is armor up the areas that, on average, don't have any bullet holes. Why? Because planes with bullet holes in those places never made it back. That's why you don't see any bullet holes there on the ones that do return. Clever!

Tim Cavanaugh defends Meg Whitman, who is taking flak for employing an immigrant later discovered to be in the country illegally:

You might make the case that Whitman should have confronted Diaz and said, "Hey Nicky, we need to sign a form and send it to Attorney General Reno proving that you're in this country legally and able to work — and I know you've already affirmed both of those things in your application [pdf] with the employment agency, but hey, let's just be on the safe side," because of course, any time you hire a person with a Spanish-sounding name you should pry into that person's immigration status. But that's not the America most of us want to live in, and it's certainly not the California anybody would be able to live in.

Serwer yawns:

The problem is that it is the America Meg Whitman wants to live in, and the California she hopes to govern. A self-styled border hawk opposed to a path to citizenship who is either too indifferent or too lazy to comply with laws she wants to make stricter …

Weigel profiles Jason Chaffetz, a first-term Utah congressman who will chair the committee that oversees DC should Republicans take back the House:

For the past four years, conservatives have been thwarted in efforts to dictate District policy on gay marriage and school vouchers. Come next year, the activists who lost those fights will expect help from Chaffetz.

Opponents of D.C.’s gay marriage law might be quickest on the trigger. The National Organization for Marriage tried, and failed, to get the D.C. Council to kill the bill. Next, NOM failed in a lawsuit to force a referendum. Chaffetz introduced legislation to do that, but it died in the House. In September’s Democratic primary, NOM-supported candidates were thrashed in Ward 5 and in a challenge to Norton. But NOM and every other social conservative organization expect to get another chance if Republicans run the House. Tony Perkins, whose Family Research Council has teamed up with Beltsville, Md.-based Bishop Harry Jackson on gay marriage, says Republicans must keep their word and force a referendum in D.C.

A previous item noted Micah Sifry's post on the relative strength of progressives and conservatives online, but misstated its conclusion: Sifry argues that the left's online base is larger, not that they'll raise more money in this election cycle. Micah Sifry defends himself and the netroots in a new post:

[M]y post wasn't about who is doing better overall politically in 2010. No one needs me to help figure out that question. It was about whose online base is bigger (and whether the Tea Party is as big as is being claimed). I'm not only interested in how many people give and how many people vote–I'm also interested in the size of the online activist pool. That's why metrics like blog readership complicate the picture.

Patrick Ruffini isn't impressed:

You don't need to be an activist, or even terribly savvy politically or technologically, to make your voice heard online nowadays. The tools have gotten so mainstream, and so easy, that the line between an activist and a supporter is blurring. 

Meanwhile, on the Republican side, we're seeing many candidates whose online fundraising now exceeds their direct mail fundraising. Are these two groups separate and distinct? Has online permanently enlarged the activist pool? Idealistically, we'd like to say yes. But practically speaking, it's probably mostly a matter of grabbing the low-hanging fruit from the offline space who simply find it more convenient to engage online. I would contend that these are no longer two radically different groups of individuals, but the larger base of conservative activists is migrating online. In this way, I don't think you can separate broader political success and enthusiasm from online activism in the way Micah does.

A reader writes:

I'm an infectious disease health practioner in the Midwest seeing mainly patients with HIV and STIs.  The recent stories of young gay men killing themselves after harassment by their peers really hit me today. For one thing, I have two boys.  Also, I have always thought that homophobia is a leading cause for patients living with HIV to be afraid of testing, treatment, coming out, etc.

This is most apparent with my patients that are minorities, as you have mentioned.  Each time I see a newly diagnosed patient I try to understand their social support network. By and large, my African-American patients have only 1-2 people in their lives that know their status. No wonder we diagnose so many young African-American men each month.

A reader writes:

In an interview with Tom Ashbrook last week, Aaron Sorkin stated that his screenplay was based almost entirely on three sets of sworn testimony by the parties involved in the Facebook legal conflicts. These three sets of individual testimonies were not only given under oath, but also directly contradicted one another in critical ways. When Sorkin says that he wants his fidelity to be to the story, not to "the truth," it's because in this story the Truth is impossible to know. According to Sorkin, he and David Fincher went to great lengths to be as accurate to the three stories presented as possible while maintaining their subjectivity, and without attempting to conflate them into one unifying "Truth."

I haven't seen the movie yet, but this seems like a much more compelling idea for a film. I mean, seriously, who the hell wants to watch a docu-drama about effing Facebook?

Or an autobiographical film about Zuckerberg?

A reader writes:

I just wanted to say thank you for your post on Obama's speech last night at the Gen44 event (full video here). I was there and I was blown away both by the positive energy of the crowd and by the determined dignified energy of Obama himself. And the thing that struck me the most about it is that his message was a simple and effective one: walking away now is like throwing in the towel when a lot of the heavy lifting has been done.

It may not be easy to stay in the ring right now, it may not be the fashionable thing to do–all of Washington is salivating to write his obituary as the Black Jimmy Carter, they have been at it since before his inauguration–but it is essential for the health and survival of our nation.

As an immigrant to this country who came because I saw the possibility he so well described in his speech and which you quoted I cannot conceive that people, out of spite, buying the spin, pique, lack of interest would give the reigns back to the Republicans so that they can destroy everything we worked so hard for. Not just in this generation, not just in the last 20 months, but the essence of what makes America the land of opportunity. As much as they embrace the flag and faux patriotism, Republicans in their unseriousness and lack of policy coherence prove that they only care about power and they will tear whatever is necessary to get it back. Don't let them!

Know Hope. I did again, last night.

A business opportunity that could save a beleaguered industry? Bainbridge is intrigued.

Chait is puzzled by News Corp's multi-million dollar donations to the GOP:

The value of News Corp to the Republican party is massive. It's worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Why also give money to Republicans? By openly donating to the party, you help tear away the mask of objectivity, thereby reducing your own value as a propaganda outlet. It seems like a bad move both for Fox and the GOP.