Obama’s data machine

Politics, Technology, , , ,

2008’s “hope and change” morphed into “Big Data” in 2012:

In fact, the tech side was the only part of the Obama operation that could credibly be framed as a throwback to the old Hope and Change: Despite the slash-and-burn quality of the Obama reelection campaign as seen by America’s television viewers, the president’s 33 million Facebook fans “were experiencing a whole different campaign that was largely positive,” Goff explained at Harvard. “What they were experiencing was this uplifting stuff about supporting the middle class, about fighting for education, and that kind of thing.” And when you consider that Obama’s Facebook fans were themselves friends with 98 percent of Facebook users in the U.S.—“That’s more than the number of people who vote,” Goff said—then the Obamanauts can plausibly argue that, for many Obama voters, maybe 2012 wasn’t that different from 2008 after all.

Even more important, the nerd narrative gives the Obamanauts hope for the future. After their historic victory in 2008, they predicted that their candidate was so amazing that he could single-handedly transform Washington by sheer force of will. That obviously didn’t come to pass. But now they are making similar predictions—not because of their man but because of their machine. “Luckily for us, I don’t see anyone on the Republican side who understands what we did,” Bird told me in Cambridge before going on to explain not only his grand designs of electing another Democrat president in 2016, but also for turning Texas blue.

The real Chris Christie

Humor, Politics, , , , ,

He’s just as funny as you might expect. But aside from the comedy, the New Jersey governor’s conversation Thursday with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show is possibly one of the best about the role of government that’s aired on American television in quite some time:

The interview kicked off with some fellow New Jerseyan and Bruce Springsteen bonding, but quickly moved into the governor’s need for federal assistance in the wake of the hurricane and whether or not that contradicts with the overall philosophical view of conservatives. To make the point, Stewart brought up Christie’s recent rejection of the bill to set up healthcare exchanges in his state, likening an individual’s healthcare crisis to a statewide catastrophe. “If you have cancer and you don’t have insurance, that’s Hurricane Sandy,” Stewart explained.

Stewart went on to assert that Republicans seem to have empathy over only those issues that affect them directly, deferring to the “free market” on everything else, but Christie disagreed. “Republicans like to have the free market, or capitalism, run things except when they believe that government is the only way to solve the problem.”

I’m unable to embed these particular videos here, so just follow the link and watch the whole thing.

Supreme Court to Hear Prop 8, DOMA case

Law, Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Photo by: J. Emilio Flores for the New York Times
Photo by: J. Emilio Flores for the New York Times

SCOTUSblog is reporting that the Supreme Court has granted certiorari to both Hollingsworth v. Perry, the California Proposition 8 case, and United States v. Windsor, a Defense of Marriage Act challenge. The Court will hear arguments in the two cases when it reconvenes in 2013.

Lyle Denniston has a preliminary breakdown of the order on SCOTUSblog’s live blog:

Prop. 8 is granted on the petition question — whether 14th Am. bars Calif. from defining marriage in traditional way. Plus an added question: Whether the backers of Prop.. 8 have standing in the case under Art. III.

[With regards to United States v. Windsor]: In addition to the petition question — whether Sec. 3 of DOMA violates equal protection under 5th Amendment, there are two other questions: does the fact that government agreed with the [Second Circuit] decision deprive the Court of jurisdiction to hear and decide the case, and whether BLAG (House GOP leaders) has Art. III standing in this case.

There is a good deal of complexity in the marriage orders, but the bottom line is this: the Court has offered to rule on Prop. 8 and on DOMA Section 3, but it also has given itself a way not to decide either case. That probably depends upon how eager the Justices are to get to the merits; if they are having trouble getting to 5 [justices] on the merits, they may just opt out through one of the procedural devices they have offered up as potentials.

More coverage of this development can be found here, here, here and here.

Our useless, do-nothing Congress

Politics, , , , , , , , ,

Mitch McConnellWondering what your favorite elected representatives are up to these days? Ask no more:

For public consumption, Democrats and Republicans are engaging in an increasingly elaborate show of political theater. Mr. Obama on Thursday went to the home of a middle-income family in the Virginia suburbs of Washington to press for an extension of expiring tax cuts for the middle class — and for the expiration of Bush-era tax cuts on incomes over $250,000.

“Just to be clear, I’m not going to sign any package that somehow prevents the top rate from going up for folks at the top 2 percent,” Mr. Obama said. “But I do remain optimistic that we can get something done.”

On Capitol Hill, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, moved Thursday to vote on Mr. Obama’s proposal, in his broader deficit package, to permanently diminish Congress’s control over the federal government’s statutory borrowing limit, assuming that Democrats would break ranks and embarrass the president. Instead, Democratic leaders did a count, found they had 51 solid votes, and took Mr. McConnell up on what Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader, called “a positive development.”

Mr. McConnell then filibustered his own bill, objecting to a simple-majority vote and saying a change of such magnitude requires the assent of 60 senators.

“I do believe we made history on the Senate floor today,” Mr. Durbin said.

Yes, Mr. Durbin, you did make history. But not just today: your current session of Congress conducted the most useless, unproductive, and inefficient use of time in our national legislature since at least 1947.

And no, I’m not just picking on Durbin. Most of the ongoing stalemate in both the House and Senate since 2009 has been the result of Republican obstinacy and intransigence — in other words, their complete denial of the reality that continues to hit them in the face regularly at four-year intervals. (In fact, of the last six presidential elections, Republicans have lost the popular vote five times.) So this is hardly a balanced phenomenon.

But there’s just something about being a senator or representative — from either party — that turns otherwise competent, reasonably intelligent human beings into overgrown children in suits and ties. No, Mr. Durbin, nothing you did today amounts to anything more than a slow, inexorable advancement of the news cycle. Your sole accomplishment in this regard is to fill the airtime on the cable news networks so they don’t have to spend those few hours discussing something even more frivolous than a predestined-to-fail bill proposed in the Senate. (And you probably didn’t even realize that was possible.)

As for Mr. McConnell, there are almost no words to describe his ongoing disastrous behavior. The resident senatorial turkey was too clever for his own good, bluffing that he’d like to go ahead with a vote on ending Congress’ power over the debt ceiling, then filibustering his own bill when it turned out the Democrats had a solid majority.

“Political theater” is right. But it’s a damn ugly performance, and one all Americans are paying for, whether or not we even realized we were attending the show.

A chemical nightmare in Syria?

Politics, , , , , , ,

Wired reports that the Syrian government is weaponizing “deadly nerve agents” and, as if that weren’t terrifying enough, the worse danger has not yet arrived:

Assad’s chemical corps have spent years buying up and experimenting with the chemicals needed to make the nerve agent sarin; not even an increasingly bloody civil war has kept the labs from running. Today, Syria-watchers in the U.S. government believe, these chemical engineers may be skilled enough in handling sarin that the nerve agent might remain deadly for up to a year. (“This is not a ‘move it or lose it’ situation,” one American official tells Danger Room.) And during that time, the sarin could be acquired by one of the Islamic extremists working in the loosely led rebel movement to topple the Assad regime. In other words: There’s the prospect of chemically armed terrorists emerging from the Syrian civil war.

“Uncertainties regarding this crisis are pervasive, yet at least one outcome is highly probable: terrorist acquisition of chemical weapons if the regime falls,” writes Federation of American Scientists analyst Charles Blair.

Related articles

A visit from the boss in Gaza

Politics, , , , , , , ,

Khaled Meshal made his first visit to the Gaza Strip today as the head of Hamas:

For Mr. Meshal, 56, it was a triumphant visit, and Hamas fighters, armed with rifles and wearing balaclavas, lined the streets where he was to travel. He entered from Egypt, through the Rafah crossing, an indication of a new alliance with Cairo.

“Gaza, with its martyrs, cannot be described in words,” he said as he arrived here, with tears in his eyes. “There are no words to describe Gaza, to describe the heroes, the martyrs, the blood, the mothers who lost their sons.

“I say I return to Gaza even if I never have been here. It has always been in my heart.”

Mr. Meshal’s visit resonated on multiple levels, reflecting the many changes that have swept the region since the Arab Spring. Mr. Meshal was permitted to cross the Egyptian border now that allies of the Muslim Brotherhood — a cousin of Hamas — have come to power. But it also reflected at least a symbolic effort to heal divisions within Hamas between Mr. Meshal and the leadership in Gaza, and for Hamas to promote its contention that it was victorious in its recent battle with Israel. Mr. Meshal fled the West Bank with his family after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and had never returned to Palestinian territory. In 1997, when he was in Amman, Jordan, agents from the Israeli intelligence service, posing as Canadian tourists, tried to kill him by injecting him with poison. The agents were captured by Jordanian authorities, and Mr. Meshal lay in a coma until the agents handed over the antidote.

Color me ignorant, but it seems bizarre to me that Meshal can navigate around Gaza so freely and openly just weeks after the conclusion of fighting precipitated by an unexpected Israeli air strike on a senior Hamas operative, Ahmed Jabari. The fact that Jabari was apparently a somewhat key contact of Israel’s makes Meshal’s very public visit all the more striking.

Israel has, quite obviously, not always been above attempted assassinations of Meshal (as evidenced by its failed 1997 attempt), so it’s interesting to guess exactly what’s preventing it from taking the easy shot now. Obviously, there would be international repercussions of some sort. But given the recent overwhelming vote (over Israel’s strong objections) to award Palestine nonmember observer state status at the United Nations, it’s not particularly clear that Israel cares much about its increasing isolation anyway.

So what is preventing Israel from assassinating Meshal? If the entire reason for its restraint is the recent truce negotiated by Egypt, then perhaps there really is some baseline level of trust between senior Israeli and Hamas officials. After all, it seems unlikely Meshal would risk appearing in public in Gaza if he didn’t have utter certainty that he wouldn’t be targeted.

Thank you, Kevin Drum

Media, Politics, , , ,

For putting the kibosh on the “Hillary Clinton is the unquestioned Democratic nominee in 2016” meme:

I don’t want to go all Andy Rooneyish on y’all, but can everyone please stop with the nonsense about Hillary Clinton being the heavy favorite for the 2016 Democratic nomination? She’s not. She’s just the best known Democrat at this moment in time. There’s a world of difference.

Heartily seconded. If I were to guess, I’d say the name Andrew Cuomo will be gaining some serious traction in the next few years. But that’s just the thing: it’s all a guess at this point.

+1: Google+ still alive and kickin’

Technology, , , ,

Admit it: you thought Google+ was basically dead. (I know I did.) Turns out, the social network is very much alive and healthy:

Google today announced that it has 135 million active users checking their Google+ streams each month, up from 100 million in mid-September. If you run the math, that means Google+ is now growing at the same pace as Facebook when it was similarly sized.

Google announced the user growth alongside a new feature called “Google+ Communities” and enhancements to Google’s mobile photo app Snapseed. Its last user count update was on Sept. 17, meaning Google+ has added 35 million stream-active users in the past 2.5 months.

That means that every month Google+ is adding about 14 million stream-active users, the type of users most comparable to those on Facebook. As it happens, Facebook added monthly active users at almost the exact same pace between late August 2008, when it reached 100 million active users, and early April 2009, when it hit 200 million active users. That seven-month spurt resulted in growth of of 14.3 million users per month.