Brian

Barring a Red Sox sized miracle comeback, Kerry will win this one. Red Sox sized miracles happen (just ask the Red Sox!) but it’ll be tough for Bush. Even if Kerry gets to 270 projected electoral votes (if he does), there’ll still be something to watch tonight though. I’m going to pay particular attention to whether he reaches two particular numbers – 297 and 317. The significance of 297 is that once he’s there, two state’s results will have to be overturned to make it a Bush victory. The significance of 317 is that once he’s there, *three* state’s results will have to be overturned to make it a Bush victory. At that point we can put away the lawyers, because there aren’t going to be three results overturned.

My credence that he’ll get to 317 is around 20%. He’d have to hold Ohio and Florida and pull off an upset somewhere – Colorado, North Carolina or Virginia seeming to be the main targets. It’s hard to make intuitive judgments about disjunctions like this one because obviously Kerry is behind the 8-ball in every one of those states. But I give some credence to the possibility he can pull off _one_ of them. If not, Court TV might be in for a ratings bonanza.

By the way, the Rep_L52 contract at Iowa is seriously underpriced. Nobody is exit polling Texas, and if Bush is running up the score there as much as Zogby is saying, he’s got way more than a 20% shot at the popular vote.

This one might be rational. As of this instant (4.16 et) Tradesports has Kerry slightly ahead of Bush. I think he should be much further ahead – at this stage he only needs one of Ohio and Florida to win and he’s a slight favourite in both. But it’s another data point.

UPDATE: As Daniel says in comments, both Tradesports and IEM can’t handle the server load today. Post any updated numbers from either site in comments here – if you can get through to those sites.

I’ve been thinking today about what the biggest surprises (other than the absence of even bigger surprises) about the campaign have been. I agree with “Big Media Matt”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/11/index.html#004655 that the it’s surprising the Republicans didn’t go after Kerry’s Senate vote against the first gulf war. I think it’s surprising that the Kerry campaign didn’t make more of his great successes as a Senator, e.g. BCCI, Iran-Contra, POW investigation etc, especially since every one of them tells against the narrative of Kerry as someone who takes the soft option.

Also on the list should be how much the anthrax attacks completely disappeared from the public consciousness. For a gratuitously extreme example, here’s “Cliff May”:http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/04_11_02_corner-archive.asp#044520

bq. It’s 3 PM on November 2, 2004. There has not been a terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11/01.

Were the anthrax attacks not terrorism, not on American soil, or not after September 11 2001? Either of the three options boggles the mind, but presumably May believes one of the disjuncts is true.

It’s nice to see which bloggers think “the most important moment in the election campaign”:http://nytimes.com/2004/11/02/opinion/02blogger-final.html?pagewanted=3&hp was centred around _them_. It reminds me of how I answer when someone asks me what the most important events in recent philosophy have been. (Well, there was this conference on the west coast I was at, and this long lunch with a few friends where we solved a bunch of problems and…)

More seriously, America’s Greatest Columnist turns in a blinder on “the joy of voting”:http://nytimes.com/2004/11/02/opinion/02krugman.html?hp.

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Currently “Tradesports”:http://www.tradesports.com/ has Bush at about a 56% chance to win the Presidency. But the “Iowa Electronic Markets”:http://128.255.244.60/quotes/78.html shows a slight lean towards a Kerry victory.

To be sure, the IEM tracks overall votes and Tradesports electoral votes, so these leanings could be consistent. And if Kerry wins the popular vote and loses outright they will be. But that looks rather unlikely. Kerry’s national vote has trailed his battleground states vote in just about every poll that’s looked at this split. This is not particularly surprising since the Bush campaign and its surrogates have massively overspent the Kerry campaign (and its surrogates) on _national_ advertising with Kerry focusing almost exclusively on battleground state advertising.

The IEM numbers are fairly close, but if they hold I suspect one or other (or quite likely both) markets will end up on the wrong side of this election. On the other hand, if Kerry does repeat Al Gore’s efforts and win the popular vote without taking over the White House, I might have to revise my faith in the success of these markets. (Of course if that happens I’ll have much more to worry about than being wrong on a technical question like this one.)

“Richard Heck”:http://emerson.fas.harvard.edu/heck/ has put together what should become one of the coolest philosophy sites on the internet – a searchable database of online papers.

bq. “PhOnline”:http://phonline.org/index.php

There isn’t much up there yet because individuals with papers have to “register”:http://phonline.org/register.php and deposit their own papers. (Which if you’re a philosopher with online papers you should do right now.) But this will in time be a phenomenal resource for philosophers and people wanting an introduction to philosophy, and we’ll all be very grateful to Richard for putting together such a wonderful site.

This isn’t exactly a news story, but David Brooks’s “latest column”:http://nytimes.com/2004/10/26/opinion/26brooks.html?hp is bizarre even by his distinctive standards. Is it meant to be biography? Autobiography? Fantasy? The mind boggles. Here’s the most charitable explanation I can come up with. “I’m a conservative columnist and it’s a week until election day. So I should like write an argument for voting for the conservative. But I can’t think of a !@#$%^& reason for doing so, or at least one that passes the giggle test. So I’ll just doodle on the page for 760 words and hope my reputation isn’t too tattered when this is all over.”

It’s impossible to think about anything other than baseball today, so time for a little Yankee-bashing. One of the odd things about the Yankees self-promotion (which I’m sadly exposed to being back in NY) is their frequent comparison between themselves and all other teams in _the world_. This can lead to problems, because while the Yankees have won more titles than any other team in major North American sports, they haven’t won more titles than lots of teams in major sports outside America. But it can also lead to interesting questions. Here’s an example from “Steven Goldman”:http://www.yesnetwork.com/yankees/news.asp?news_id=675, who is in general one of the best sportswriters on the internets.

bq. New York has won more sporting championships than any other city in the world.

Is this true?

My first instinct was that Glasgow would have more championships that New York running away, but maybe that’s overlooking the New York teams (especially the baseball Giants) that have left. Or maybe it’s unfair to include Glasgow. It’s certainly unfair, for example, to include all the AFL championships won by Melbourne teams from back in the years when all, or all but one, of the AFL teams were from Melbourne. So which is the most successful sporting city _in the world_?

This is very weird. I was filling in the details on my latest “DS-156”:https://evisaforms.state.gov/ds156.asp?lang=1 form, a form the State Department quite helpfully makes available electronically. When I went to fill in question 35, “Has Your U.S. Visa Ever Been Cancelled or Revoked?” on my defeault Firefox browser, it automatically marked “Yes” whatever I clicked. Needless to say, this is _not_ the answer I wanted to communicate to the State Department. So I tried opening up the form in IE, and the problem goes away, i.e. it is possible to mark “No”. Nothing in the source code for the page suggests why there should be a problem here, at least to my untrained eyes. It’s just odd.

I hope Lynne Cheney is being misreported by the “Los Angeles Times”:http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-na-history8oct08,1,7344885.story?coll=la-news-learning

bq. At the time, Lynne Cheney, the wife of now-Vice President Cheney, led a vociferous campaign complaining that the [National Standards for History] were not positive enough about America’s achievements and paid too little attention to figures such as Gen. Robert E. Lee, Paul Revere and Thomas Edison …

bq. Cheney led the charge on the original UCLA draft. In a widely read opinion piece published in 1994, she complained that “We are a better people than the National Standards indicate, and our children deserve to know it.” The standards contained repeated references to the Ku Klux Klan and to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the anti-Communist demagogue of the 1950s, she said. And she noted that Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave who helped run the Underground Railroad, was mentioned six times. But Revere, Lee, the Wright brothers and other prominent figures went unmentioned, she said.

Harriet Tubman is a genuine American hero, someone who immeasurably improved the lives of more Americans than you or I could dream of. Highlighting her work, and the work of the Underground Railroad, is highlighting what is best about America and Americans. Robert Lee was a military commander of a treasonous rebellion that killed and terrorised more Americans than any other enemy in history. And according to the LA Times, Cheney thinks that the way to make American history books make America look _better_ is by less Tubman and more Lee?! I’m not overly sympathetic to the idea we should teach feel-good versions of history, but if that’s your plan shouldn’t you at least focus on things that kids can actually feel good about?

As I said, I hope this is the LA Times’s misreporting (damn you liberal media!) rather than something Cheney actually believes.

“Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/10/cancel-it.html linked to “this discussion”:http://www.xoverboard.com/blogarchive/week_2004_10_03.html#000967 of the rather odd claim that in 164 different TV shows, what we’re seeing is not what is really happening in the fiction, but what happens in the mind of a small character from _St. Elsewhere_ called Tommy Westphall.

The argument for this claim, what I’ll call the Westphall Hypothesis, is based around a rather impressive bit of research about “crossovers in TV-land”:http://home.vicnet.net.au/~kwgow/crossovers.html. (The site seems to be based in Victoria, so I have some natural fondness for it.) The reasoning is as follows. The last episode of _St. Elsewhere_ revealed that the entire storyline of that show hadn’t really (i.e. really in the fiction) happened but had all been a dream of Tommy Westphall. So by extension any story involving a character from St. Elsewhere is really (in the fiction) part of Tommy’s dream. And any story involving a character from one of those shows is also part of Tommy’s dream, etc. So all 164 shows that are connected to _St. Elsewhere_ in virtue of character sharing are part of Tommy’s dream.

It’s a nice little idea, but there are half a dozen things wrong with it.

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In a move that might shock some in the philosophical community, NYU is about to _commence_ a hiring campaign.

bq. New York University is on a hiring campaign that it hopes will put its graduate and undergraduate liberal arts programs on sounder footing and give them the stature of some of its most prominent professional schools. Over the next five years, it plans to expand its 625-member arts and science faculty by 125 members, and replace another 125 who are expected to leave. (“New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/27/education/27nyu.html?ex=1253937600&en=70320bbf92d34f3b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland)

If hiring Ned Block, Hartry Field, Kit Fine, David Velleman etc etc was what they do in normal times, it could get a little scary to see what they do in an expansionary era.

“Kevin”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_09/004738.php and “Matt”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/09/gerrymandering.html are talking redistricting, with Matt favouring proportional representation on the grounds that it would introduce intraparty competition into American politics. This is rather odd – it’s only been a few months since the Presidential primaries, which are the most vigorously and open contested intraparty political fights in the world outside of the New South Wales Labor Party. And any experience with internal Labor (or Labour) Party fights does not immediately make one think it would make the world a better place to expand that kind of fighting.

But I didn’t want to make a substantive proposal, just ask a procedural question. To the best of my knowledge there are only two classes of country where the electoral system, from drawing boundaries to determining ballot order to deciding whether there will be recounts and so on, is run by partisan appointees.

bq. Class One: China, Cuba, etc., i.e. countries where it is known in advance how the results will turn out.
Class Two: The United States of America (with the honourable exception of Iowa).

Are there any other countries in Class Two, or is America unique in being a democracy where one of the prizes of victory is getting to be the umpire next time the game is played?

“Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/09/moral_relativis.html and “Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_09/004725.php have been discussing various ethical buzzwords that have been flying around recently, all starting from “this post”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_09_14.shtml#1095446087 of Eugene Volokh’s. I don’t have enough expertise to helpfully say very much here, but I thought I’d try adding some small points.

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