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Eric Ostermeier has a nice post about the profile of the Tea...

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:39:00 -0500

Eric Ostermeier has a nice post about the profile of the Tea Party Caucus. I thought I would look quickly at the roll call voting behavior of the caucus members relative to the rest of the House and the GOP.

For the 111th House, the mean of the Tea Party Caucus members on the first dimension of DW-NOMINATE is .7 and for Republican non-caucus members the mean is .61. On the second dimension, the Tea Party Caucus mean is .15 and for non-caucus members it is -.06. Both these differences are statistically significant.

Update. Ari wants me to tell him what this means. I think it just means that the Tea Party Caucus members are among the more conservative members of the GOP. To the extent that we might think that there are two dimensions structuring US political debate (one dividing the parties on economic issues, the second on social and cultural issues), Tea Party Caucus members tend to be those that exhibit what we’d cautiously interpret as more conservative behavior on both dimensions. I don’t think this is surprising, those members of Congress who are choosing to identify as Tea Partiers are those who choose to vote a little bit more conservatively than their peers in the Republican Party.

If there is anything interesting here, it’s a suggestion (through the differences on the second dimension) that those members of the House choosing to affiliate with the Tea Party aren’t likely to vote like Republican libertarians in the Ron Paul mold. They’re more like Tea Party Caucus founder Michele Bachmann.

Sources:

[1] Members of the Tea Party Caucus

[2] DW-NOMINATE Scores from Royce Carroll, Jeff Lewis, James Lo, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal.

"Web 2.0 users succeed when they generate idiosyncratic, personalized content. Governments, on the..."

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:06:25 -0500

“Web 2.0 users succeed when they generate idiosyncratic, personalized content. Governments, on the other hand, are team operations, designed to harness different organizations into a common message.”

- Dan Drezner

"The Tea Party Caucus is strictly issue based in nature, promoting policies of fiscal responsibility..."

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 22:28:57 -0500

“The Tea Party Caucus is strictly issue based in nature, promoting policies of fiscal responsibility and limited government with a strict adherence to our Constitution at the forefront.”

- Michele Bachmann starts the congressional Tea Party Caucus

"Obviously the conservative movement is intoxicated with hubris right now. Part of this hubris is..."

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 08:21:00 -0500

“Obviously the conservative movement is intoxicated with hubris right now. Part of this hubris is their belief that the American people are truly and deeply on their side and that the last two elections were either a fluke or the product of a GOP that was too centrist. It’s a tactical radicalism, a belief that ideological purity carries no electoral cost whatsoever…. Tactical radicalism is not the same thing as ideological radicalism. Tactical radicals are a subset of ideological radicals; some ideological radicals have clear-eyed of the pragmatic steps needed to advance their goals incrementally.”

- Jonathan Chait on the most pure of the purists

St. Vincent Pitchfork Music Festival 2010 Union Park Chicago, IL

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 09:38:04 -0500

St. Vincent
Pitchfork Music Festival 2010
Union Park Chicago, IL

"Loving sports, by definition, requires a certain suspension of disbelief and logic. We are all..."

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 17:23:38 -0500

“Loving sports, by definition, requires a certain suspension of disbelief and logic. We are all pouring our hearts and souls into cheering for men (and women) who do not care about us, who are not like us, who are not the type of people we would ever associate with (or even meet) in real life. We deify them because it is hard to find people to deify in the real world: Sports spans every age group, ethnic group, political persuasion, and all else that serves to divide us, separate us. We cheer for athletes because sports does not matter, not really. We cheer because sports is, ultimately, harmless.”

- Will Leitch on LeBron James (via @jeremymullman)

"If you want to see the pinnacle of Apple application design, spend some time in Keynote."

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 10:37:46 -0500

“If you want to see the pinnacle of Apple application design, spend some time in Keynote.”

- Michael Lopp on The Setup

"Behind [vegans’] beliefs is the hopeless longing for innocence. Except that there is no innocence...."

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 00:42:00 -0500

“Behind [vegans’] beliefs is the hopeless longing for innocence. Except that there is no innocence. However delicate our moral sensibilities, it still remains that to be alive is to be a murderer.”

- Harold Fromm

The Law of One Platform

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:47:00 -0500

The Law of One Platform:

Senate challenger Sharron Angle is upset that Harry Reid’s campaign has re-published her primary website which was presumably more Tea Partyish than the presentation of self she planned on using for Nevada’s general electorate (via @pwire).

"[O]n the much, much more interesting questions—how much of the rise in partisanship do those..."

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 15:34:00 -0500

“[O]n the much, much more interesting questions—how much of the rise in partisanship do those changing mores explain, and what else might explain them? — [Trent] Lott really isn’t an authority at all. Treating him as one is sort of like treating a pitcher as an expert on the physics behind a curveball — you might get something interesting out of the conversation, but if you really want an informed perspective, you’re better off asking someone who’s actually studied the issue at hand.”

- Greg Marx

New Food

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 15:23:26 -0500

New Food:

Innovation in cooking continues without the protection of intellectual property rights (via Freakonomics). The parallels to live music seem important.

More On The Shallows

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 17:38:26 -0500

"All successful revitalization efforts focus on upgrading existing local assets — developing better..."

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 17:36:00 -0500

“All successful revitalization efforts focus on upgrading existing local assets — developing better ties among colleges, universities and communities, strengthening business districts, upgrading parks and open spaces, preserving and reusing old buildings and supporting local art and music.”

- Richard Florida

“In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” — Phish, Columbia, MD 6/26/2010...

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 13:40:00 -0500

“In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” — Phish, Columbia, MD 6/26/2010 (via etree).

Does it make me a bad person that I sorta hope this pisses some people off?

Here’s hoping that the next version of iBooks gets the PDF highlighting and notes that were...

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:26:00 -0500

Here’s hoping that the next version of iBooks gets the PDF highlighting and notes that were introduced for ePubs today.

If I finish some work ahead of schedule this week, you all might suffer a rant filled with my hopes and dreams for notes and metadata on the iPad, tentatively entitled, “Content Creation, Not the Herculean Task it’s Made to Be.”

Safari Reader will apparently stitch together (in some...

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:16:00 -0500

Safari Reader will apparently stitch together (in some circumstances) pages from different articles. Pictured above is today’s Future Shock and Under the Knife from Baseball Prospectus. Maybe the stitching was triggered by the link at the bottom to the previous article along with the sequential article ID numbers in the URLs?

I assume 3 other people besides me find this interesting and 1 of them is on his way to Portugal.

I still mostly prefer Readability.

The Velluvial Matrix

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 10:39:00 -0500

The Velluvial Matrix:

Atul Gawande on complexity in medicine and healthcare.

Via Give Me Something to Read.

Federal Regions

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:02:04 -0500

A smattering of federally defined regions of varying levels of importance.

The Twelve Federal Reserve Districts

United States Courts of Appeals

United States Department of Energy

Federal Emergency Management Agency

Census Regions and Divisions of the United States

Mind Over Mass Media

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 23:37:00 -0500

Mind Over Mass Media:

Steven Pinker defends our digital age.

"In part due to competitive pressures, it’s newspaper writers and talk-show hosts who, by and large,..."

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 17:17:30 -0500

“In part due to competitive pressures, it’s newspaper writers and talk-show hosts who, by and large, push the notion that there’s always a reason, that there has to be a reason.”

- Joe Sheehan writing about the over-interpretation of small samples in baseball, but it could be about public opinion polls, or primary election results or whathaveyou.