Month: September 2012

In reviewing Nora Young's The Virtual Self, Navneet Alang lingers on how our digital lives have evolved our sense of self-image:

[T]o exist online is to be famous—or at least "micro-famous," as Internet entrepreneur Rex Sorgatz once called it. To be known by the collection of words and images we put out into public space was once the domain of a tiny few, those whose fame allowed them to be known by many. But in a remarkably short amount of time, many of us have come to exist in relation to a public projection of ourselves, a stand-in that more or less works as a separate yet fundamental part of who we are. What is true for Marilyn, Madonna and Lady Gaga—that there are always at least two versions, the public circulation of chatter and pictures, and the private—is now true for most of us.

She considers the philosophical implications:

All we can say is that we are never more to be simply "individuals." Descartes ‘left’ his body so as to return to it, certain of the relationship between that one solitary object and the world out there. Alas, such sureness is not for us. It is the overlapped duality of the digital and the bodily that is our fate. Where we once had a private journal or the insides of our minds, we now have a kaleidoscopic public canvas onto which to paint ourselves for others to see. And in the future, who we are will always be both our bodily self and its public hologram—sometimes together, sometimes apart—but never again a version of us that is to be found in just one place.

(Photo from Mathieu Grac’s series of social media portraits in progress)

Behind Obama's move in the polls is a big move in his approval ratings in the last couple of weeks. Here's the last few months showing the disapproval/approval numbers from RCP:

The bounce is slipping a little, but it's bigger than anything Obama has experienced since March. Gallup finds the same thing:

These are not horse-race numbers; they are approval ratings. Fox's latest poll shows Obama at 50 percent approval – which makes him very hard to beat if he's an incumbent. Nate Cohn examines the Fox poll internals, and it looks worse:

While Romney argues that Obama has failed on the economy, the Fox polls suggests that most voters don’t quite see it that way. Just 36 percent of voters give Obama a D or an F on the economy, compared to 38 percent of voters who give him an A or a B. There are a lot of voters with a decidedly mixed view, including 14 percent who give him a “C” and 11 percent who give him an “incomplete,” as the president did himself….

50 percent of likely voters say that if Obama is elected, they would feel that “the country’s improving and I look forward to another 4 years" compared to 43 percent who would say “the country’s going down the drain and I’m dreading what is going to happen next.” While 49 percent of voters say the country is worse off than it was four years ago, that’s not enough to outweigh the other numbers.

In other words: Americans aren't as dumb and Manichean as Mitt Romney thinks they are. The Romneyites push back that this is a convention sugar high, and it's really 1980 and that Reagan surged at the end from behind, and Romney can too. But the Reagan comeback myth is a myth, derived from Gallup.

Check this timeline of all the polling in 1980 from John Sides earlier this year:

Reagan was never behind Carter in the poll of polls from May of 1980 onwards. Equally, Obama has never been behind Romney in national polls from November of 2011 onwards. Yes, Reagan did have a last minute surge to give him a landslide, thanks to the debates, but he would have won without it. From September on, the 1980 race looks a little like the current gap between the two candidates, but with the roles reversed. Carter was a few points behind, like Romney, but never managed to overtake him when it mattered, and then suddenly lost in a landslide.

As Nate Cohn notes, if this is Romney's view of the race, he's gonna lose. He and his party are zombie Reaganites living in a different time with different challenges. And they have no idea what to do. Or how talented a campaigner their opponent is.

Josh Barro celebrates QE3:

While overly tight monetary policy has hit the unemployed the hardest, it has been bad for almost everybody, including rich people. It’s true that disinflation has been good for certain securities, particularly low-risk bonds. But wealthy bondholders also tend to be wealthy stockholders, and Fed policies that hold economic growth down are bad for equities. Most advocates of hard money are simply making a mistake, not putting their interests ahead of the common good.

Felix Salmon thinks "the real innovation here is that the Fed is moving aggressively into the world of words rather than deeds" by not just buying bonds but "trying to boost the economy by promising to continue buying bonds":

None of this is going to make any noticeable difference before the presidential election: it’s all marginal, really. But if it seems as though QE3 is having a bit more of a real-world effect than QE2 did — if, that is, it helps the job numbers rather than just the markets — then the lesson will be clear. The Fed’s balance sheet is a powerful tool to use — but its vocal chords might be even more powerful still.

Derek Thompson adds:

Bernanke essentially said: I'm going to keep my foot on the gas even after the economy starts to recover. Good economic reports or bad, the Federal Reserve will be working to keep interest rates low "for a considerable time after the economic recovery strengthens." We don't know what impact this will have on the housing and jobs market. But we're all about to learn the value of a Ben Bernanke promise.

Brad Plumer rounds up other reactions. As does John Hudson. Earlier commentary here.

(Photo: Chairman of Federal Reserve Board Ben Bernanke speaks during a news conference on September 13, 2012 in Washington, DC. Following a two-day Federal Open Market Committee meeting, Bernanke presented the FOMC’s current economic projections and provided additional context for the FOMC’s policy decision. The Federal Reserve announced it will purchase additional agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month to support a stronger economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation is at the rate most consistent with its dual mandate over time. By Alex Wong/Getty Images)

MicMac Lane from Eric Funk on Vimeo.

This is my Degree Project from MassArt. The goal was to capture the energy and fluidity that goes into the sport of basketball. I hand drew every frame of this using Microns and composited them onto brown paper. Original Music by my good friend Evan Morse who's work you should definitely check out at http://evanmorse.bandcamp.com/

 

ENCODE, an Encyclopedia Of DNA Elements, is a massive international project aimed "to catalogue every letter (nucleotide) within the genome that does something." Ed Yong marvels:

Think of the human genome as a city. The basic layout, tallest buildings and most famous sights are visible from a distance. That’s where we got to in 2001. Now, we’ve zoomed in. We can see the players that make the city tick: the cleaners and security guards who maintain the buildings, the sewers and power lines connecting distant parts, the police and politicians who oversee the rest. That’s where we are now: a comprehensive 3-D portrait of a dynamic, changing entity, rather than a static, 2-D map.

Brendan Maher has more.

Walter Kirn, who is not a regular political journalist and whose time in Charlotte was his first convention, found the pervasive groupthink among writers intellectually stultifying:

To disagree with the conventional wisdom even as it’s being born around you—and even as you’re trying with all your might to anticipate and even shape it—is a profoundly disorienting experience. It makes you wonder if you were there at all, or if there even exists a there to be at. Ideally, a convention would be a ground zero of factuality, an objective reality in a shifting universe of spin and opinion and second-order commentary. But the further you get inside one, I’m discovering, the more deliriously lost you feel, particularly to the self that you came in with. How does one both enter the group mind and stay inside one’s own mind? It’s a challenge.

That's one reason I don't go. It's a television infomercial best judged by watching the television!

(Image from Tom Scott's Journalism Warning Labels)

Abby Rapoport thinks the real GOP victory in 2010 wasn't in Congress, but in the gaining "control of 21 house and senate chambers" at the state level:

While Republican members of Congress were focused on blocking the Democratic agenda, Republican state lawmakers began to drive the national policy debate. They wasted no time slashing social programs, weakening women’s reproductive rights and collective bargaining, and creating new barriers to voting rights.

What's more, she notes, the GOP bankrollers understand the superior return on investment of down-ticket races. She claims that "Republican groups, with their deep-pocketed backers, are aiming for a repeat performance in 2012":

The outcomes will have enormous implications. States’ refusal to expand Medicaid could derail Obama’s health-care plan. Anti-immigration laws will continue to proliferate in the states while Congress hems and haws about comprehensive reform. Republican lawmakers will continue to push for charter schools and private-school vouchers at the cost of traditional public education. Fights over civil-rights issues like gay marriage and voting rights, not to mention women’s rights, will play out almost entirely in the halls of state capitols.