Clips from the road

Clips from the road

It's a human being weekend in Wisconsin (more on that story soon) so we'll stick with clips:

Amidst a lengthy Nate Silver analysis of Democratic messaging, this gem:

The number of politics "fans" probably numbers somewhere on the order of 10 or 20 million out of a country of 250 million adults. Most people have lives and have better things to do than to follow politics all the time.

So if you're reading this, you don't have a life. This isn't just snark, it's to the point:

Only 26 percent of Americans know that it takes 60 votes to overcome a Senate filibuster -- and only 32 percent know that Senate GOPers voted unanimously against the Democrats' health care plan... They're developing impressions based on limited information, often gleaned from partisan news sources and politicians who have an incentive to tell them anything but the truth.

Fired for a bumpersticker? It can happen.

DC as fantasy league: "You've got to love a game that lets James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Barney Frank (D-Mass.) be on the same roster (though I wouldn't take either of them before the fourth round)."

Fox News has an Obama approval poll, which is about as smart as televising Obama's question time with the House GOP. You know what to do.

Democrats in Academic Strongholds

All's Well for Dems in People's Republic

Larry Sabato joined the post-Massachusetts doom and gloom chorus yesterday. I'm not convinced--I still think it's primarily Coakley's fault.

But amidst Sabato's rending of garments and gnashing of teeth, which was clearly written before the damn solid State of the Union, I found a silver lining:

As for the Obama coalition, only the liberal wing held fairly firm for Coakley. While she ran 15 percentage points worse than Obama statewide, Coakley was down only 3 or 4 points in leftish academic centers such as Amherst and Cambridge and the gay-friendly resort town of Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod.

Gay-friendly leftish academic centers... pretty much describes my own People's Republic of Johnson County. The very week of the Massachusetts Massacree, we were declared the third gayest city in America.

One of the things the Advocate gave us points for was our out local elected officials, a barrier we first broke a dozen years ago. And on the very day of the Massachusetts election, we added one more to the list, with voters strongly backing Janelle Rettig (who was already in office by appointment).

More to Sabato's point, the special election saw Rettig polling close to Obama's percentages in the urban parts of the county. True, Republican Lori Cardella won big in the rural area, but as I said before the rurals treated the special as a purely local election. In town, they voted partisan. Which bodes well for Chet Culver, Dave Loebsack and the Senate nominee.

Chet Culver pulled 68% here in 2006, a record that Obama broke with just short of 70. But percentages aren't what matters this fall--it's sheer numbers. Johnson County's job is to overcome big GOP wins in the northwest corner of the state. Culver took a 17,000 lead over Jim Nussle in Johnson County, better than Tom Vilsack's 12k win over Doug Gross in `02.

Good turnout at the State of the Union Party -- over 50 mostly young people in downtown Iowa City just to watch the speech on TV with no bigshot attending in person -- bodes well. The question, as always with Dems these days, is how to translate that personal like for Obama (who is still PERSONALLY more popular than party of perceived policy) into votes for other Democrats.

Joe Walsh Sues Joe Walsh

Joe Walsh vs. Joe Walsh

Geezers like me remember guitarist Joe Walsh's foray into the Pat Paulsen territoy of parody political candidacy. The silliest Eagle "ran" for president in 1980 on a "Free Gas For Everyone" platform. 12 years later Joe announced a vice presidential candidacy and even wrote the most politically to the point song this side of Alice Cooper's "I Wanna Be Elected": "Vote For Me."

I’d like to announce my candidacy,
I’d appreciate it if you’d vote for me.
I want to be Vice President.
Vote for me.

If I was Vice President you know what I’d do?
Pretty much anything I wanted to.
Vote for me. Vote for me.

I’d have a first class seat on Air Force One.
An awesome pad in Washington...D.C. (If you vote for me)
Play golf all day with heads of state,
If they brought beer wouldn’t that be great? I can’t wait!
Vote for me. Vote for me.

Pretty much says it all.
I don't know much of Joe Walsh's political views, but he did spend a lot of years hanging out with Don Henley, so some leftyness may have rubbed off.

Now Joe Walsh is running for Congress, and Joe Walsh has a problem with that. See, candidate Joe Walsh is a different Joe Walsh than musician Joe Walsh. And candidate Joe Walsh is using musician Joe Walsh's Joe Walsh music.



And musician Joe Walsh is sending in the lawyers:

A lawyer for singer Walsh wrote to candidate Walsh to demand he stop using the music from "Walk Away" -- a pre-Eagles Joe Walsh hit with the band James Gang -- in a campaign music video.

The Walsh campaign reworked it as "Lead the Way." The line "seems to me, you just turn your pretty head and walk away" becomes, in the candidate's version, "seems to me, Joe Walsh is just the perfect guy to lead the way."

So candidate Joe Walsh may have to do without musician Joe Walsh's Joe Walsh music--but at least he has the endorsement of the Lake County, Illinois Tea Party.

iPad and DRM

iPad and DRM

The first look at the iPad yesterday reminded me of those giant remote controls that are sold half-seriously as a you won't lose this gag. Looks like an iPhone that's waaay too big for your pocket.

I've never really used a tablet, though I've got one friend who swears by them. All a matter of user need, I guess. (I can't see myself writing a liveblog on a touchscreen virtual keyboard; remember, I'm the guy who spent months hunting down an ancient early `80s IBM keyboard because I love the hard clack of the keys.)

But there's a bigger issue underlying the iPad rollout that has a ripple effect through the whole computing world.

The iPad is locked down with DRM - that's Digital Rights Management for the uninitiated - and it means there's no free ride ever. DRM is essentially the evil opposite of open source. More specifically,

Digital rights management (DRM) is a generic term for access control technologies that can be used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals to try to impose limitations on the usage of digital content and devices. It is also, sometimes, disparagingly described as Digital Restrictions Management. The term is used to describe any technology which inhibits uses (legitimate or otherwise) of digital content that were not desired or foreseen by the content provider.

A red flag for us Linux geeks.

There were protests at the rollout, and here's a sample of the rhetoric:

DRM will give Apple and their corporate partners the power to disable features, block competing products (especially free software) censor news, and even delete books, videos, or news stories from users' computers without notice-- using the device's "always on" network connection.

By making a computer where every application is under total, centralized control, Apple is endangering freedom to increase profits. Apple can say they will not abuse this power, but their record of App Store rejections and removals gives us no reason to trust them. The iPad's unprecedented use of DRM to control all capabilities of a general purpose computer is a dangerous step backward for computing and for media distribution.

It's an ongoing question in three of my favorite things, computing, music, and journalism. We've invented Big Smart Box where all the information in the world ever is instantly available, but we haven't figured out a way to get the band paid.

In other critiques, Davey Winder finds 15 things wrong with it, and of course I'm a sucker for numbered lists. And Steven Vaughn-Nichols says Anything the iPad can do, Linux can do better.

State Of The Union Chat

State Of The Union Chat

One last thought that didn't make the live chat: My dat the retired coach is a pure independent and I bet he loved the "don't qut" ending.

Liveblog Tonight

State of the Union Liveblog Tonight

I'll be wearing the beret on the Register's behalf tonight to cover the State of the Union. Since more people is more fun, join me either at the Reg or at 7:45 at the Obama ORGANIZING for America party:

David's Place (Iowa City, IA)
100 S. Linn St
Iowa City, IA 52240

(it's ORGANIZING for America but it's still barackobama.com)

13 levels of defeat

13 levels of defeat

That was a familiar sight yesterday: Brett Favre's last pass of the season in the NFC championship going for an interception... and it got me to thinking about the psychology of different kinds of defeats.

ESPN's Bill Simmons wrote a piece a while back called "The 13 Levels of Losing," in which he runs though any number of defeat scenarios by increasing levels of pain. This, of course, needs to be applied to politics. Let's look at a few of his benchmarks; throw your own in the comments.

The Massachusetts scenario best fits Simmons' Level V:, the "This Can't Be Happening" Game:

The sibling of the Full-Fledged Butt-Kicking ... you're supposed to win, you expect to win, the game is a mere formality ... suddenly your team falls behind, your opponents are fired up, the clock is ticking and it dawns on you for the first time, "Oh my God, this can't be happening."

So that's on the high end.

Level XIII: The Princeton Principle. Definition: When a Cinderella team hangs tough against a heavy favorite, but the favorite somehow prevails in the end (like Princeton almost toppling Georgetown in the '89 NCAAs) ... this one stings because you had low expectations, but those gritty underdogs raised your hopes.

A little obscure, but I thought of netroots hero Paul Hackett almost beating Mean Jean Schmidt in the Ohio House special in 2005.

Level IX: The Sudden Death. Definition: Is there another fan experience quite like overtime hockey, when every slap shot, breakaway and centering pass might spell doom, and losing feels 10 times worse than winning feels good (if that makes sense)? ... there's only one mitigating factor: when OT periods start piling up and you lose the capacity to care anymore; invariably you start rooting for the game to just end, just so you don't suffer a heart attack .

The 2008 Democratic primaries, no question. Everything after Super Tuesday had the psychology of overtime.

Level XI: The Alpha Dog. Definition: It might have been a devastating loss, but at least you could take solace that a superior player made the difference in the end ... unfortunately, he wasn't playing for your team.

Ronald Reagan promising not to use Mondale's youth an inexperience.

Level VIII: Dead Man Walking. Definition: Applies to any playoff series when your team remains "alive," but they just suffered a loss so catastrophic and so harrowing that there's no possible way they can bounce back ... especially disheartening because you wave the white flag mentally, but there's a tiny part of you still holding out hope for a miraculous momentum change ... so you've given up, but you're still getting hurt, if that makes sense.

This must be how John McCain felt.

Level VI: The Full-Fledged Butt-Kicking. Definition: Sometimes you can tell right away when it isn't your team's day ... and that's the worst part, not just the epiphany but everything that follows -- every botched play, every turnover, every instance where someone on your team quits, every "deer in the headlights" look, every time an announcer says, "They can't get anything going," every shot of the opponents celebrating, every time you look at the score and think to yourself, "Well, if we score here and force a turnover, maybe we'll get some momentum," but you know it's not going to happen, because you're already 30 points down ... you just want it to end, and it won't end ... but you can't look away ... it's the sports fan's equivalent to a three-hour torture session.

1994.

Level I: That Game. Definition: Game 6 of the 1986 World Series ... one of a kind ... given the circumstances and the history involved here, maybe the most catastrophic sports loss of our lifetime.

Two words: hanging chad.