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If FO thinks she is ready for every issue she plans to vote on, we could vote as early as tonight.

One thing that could hurt Obama would be that young people never turn out to vote. On the other hand, I would guess that retirees would skew towards Obama since protecting social security is not a Republican priority.

I seriously doubt his chances to win.

My mother was volunteering to get the vote out for Obama, but, as an irony, she doesn't know if my brother voted and doesn't seem to be trying hard to get him out to vote. I think that might be because my brother might vote for McCain.

Another anecdote was that she went to someone's house and told an occupant that she knew his wife had an absentee ballot she hadn't sent in yet. And the guy got pissed at her for knowing that. I said, gee, I might get pissed about that, too. But apparently things like that are a matter of public record.

They've been calling Palin a maverick from the beginning. They said something about how she took on Republicans and fought corruption in Alaska.

Turns out that what really happened was that she stepped over people who gave her career a boost, and she filled her administration with friends she knew in highschool.

(Don't you remember that time during the VP debate where Biden was chocked up about his dead wife, and Palin fired back about how they were mavericks?)

As for McCain, there are some videos of him on the internet from several years ago saying the Bush tax cuts are unfair because they disproportionately benefited the rich. Maybe he could be called a maverick for that? Of course, now he says that rolling those tax cuts back will turn us into communist China.


You know, when people complain about "spreading the wealth" now, it's like they've gone to the point of being mustache twirling Snidely Whiplash-level delighting-in-evil-for-the-sake-of-evil cartoonish villains.

I mean, the usual Republican argument (whether or not it makes sense) was that by helping the richest people, it helps everyone. Now they're almost blatantly saying that poor people should get poorer and rich people should get richer.

If you try to ignore any partisan perspective on this, it's really ridiculous. For example, we're running a deficit! McCain was saying, "How can you raise taxes when times are bad?", but we've been running a deficit almost my entire life, except when Clinton was in office. Here is Colin Powell delivering what I think could be a nonpartisan perspective on both McCain's attack ads and the tax issue.




By the way, there was one idea I heard from McCain that wasn't an attack on Obama. It was about having the government purchase mortages that were foreclosed so people could stay in their homes. Interesting, maybe, but I'd need to hear a LOT more details about that plan to know if it really is a good idea. Unfortunately, with all the attention being put towards attacks on Obama, he gave no details (in fact, commentators on both sides were surprised that he seemed to launch this idea in the middle of the second debate)

For example, one thing that led to the housing crisis was that people bought homes as investments, to "flip" them. But when the mortage became more than the house was worth, since they had no personal attachment to the house, it was in their rational self interest to let the home be foreclosed on. Because they lost some money in it as an investment, but they only stood to lose even more if they kept paying the mortage.

There is no societal value to have the government buy those houses. It's not an issue of keeping people in their homes, because there are no people in those homes.

Now, I don't know how widespread that is. But that's what I mean when I say McCain wasn't really giving details on his plan.


On Obama's half hour commerical, he talked about a 90 day moratorium on foreclosures. Now, I don't know exactly how that would work, either. But it seems like it could make a little more sense. People who lived in their home but were having trouble with their mortage would try to make good-faith payments, while people who truly abandoned their homes wouldn't.

People have looked up information on him, and made public his income, his certification (or lack thereof), and how he owed taxes. Now, on the one hand, all that is public record, and it's not necessarily an "attack" in and of itself, it's just a statement of fact. However, I can imagine that an average person wouldn't want attention drawn to facts about themselves, even for things that are a matter of public record.


Anyway, I was wondering to myself, How can this "spread the wealth" thing possible be a winning strategy in a democracy? 95% of people won't get a tax raise.

But it occurred to me, what do a lot of people get worked up over on an emotional level? The Enron scandals? Eh. AIG executive golden parachutes? Eh. But what about that lazy neighbor down the street who doesn't have a job at all! Now that's what's really offensive!!

That's personal and familiar. A normal person can hardly even imagine earning a $20 million severance package after doing no work. You don't know those people, you yourself have no chance of earning that much money, the amount of money is so vast for an average person it's abstract; it's hard to get it to mean anything.

Now you just need to get people making $35,000 / year to think that they're the well-off people whose income will be tapped to support people they personally don't like, and it seems like a democratically viable strategy again.

Some people also seem to have delusions that their income will skyrocket and then they'd have to pay those high taxes.

Another point to make is that simulations don't decrease error. In fact, they add their own error.

As a really simple example, imagine Obama and McCain were exactly at 50% in the polls. Then you could do a "simulation" by tossing a coin. But if you did 10 coin tosses, you might not get exactly 5 heads, 5 tails. You might get 6 and 4 or 7 and 3. But anything other than 50-50 is the simulation's error.

Of course, you can decrease the simulation's error by running it more times.