No horse play, please.
Archives for November 2011
Recalling Governor Walker
Balloon Juice reader and occasional commenter VidaLoca is in Milwaukee County and he sent me some info on how the recall campaign is going:
The cars pulled up to the curb on a west side street and within a minute or two they pulled away, leaving behind the drivers’ signatures to recall Gov. Scott Walker and Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch. The recall drive is rolling around Wisconsin, with petition circulators holding everything from midnight parties to this curbside collection effort. Scores of drives statewide have been held on some days, focusing on everything from Black Friday retailers to deer-cleaning stations, sporting events and holiday parades. This group of about 80 volunteers has been working in shifts of six to eight people to collect signatures on a series of high-traffic Madison streets that are wide enough to let a steady stream of cars pull over safely without having to go into a parking lot. For a week, this group alone has been averaging some 400 signatures a day, with many stops taking less time than the average fast food drive-through.
I wasn’t expecting the reception I got on Saturday in the small southwest Wisconsin town near our family’s cabin. I walked both sides of a long residential street, taking petitions door-to-door for people to sign in support of recalling Gov. Scott Walker and Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch.
In my first three houses, eight people signed. A wife apologized for making me wait, but took the petitions into another room because her husband wanted to sign.
A grandmother and her daughter stopped cleaning out toys from their house long enough to sign. “Do you know how hard his policies are on us?” the daughter asked. “And he’s tried to do even more damage than he’s done!”
The elderly couple with the “We support our troops” sign on their door stopped cutting up their Thanksgiving turkey for a Sunday gathering of the clan to wash their hands and sign. “What he’s done to health care and education is just wrong.”
I believe that the Recall Walker campaign leaders significantly underestimated discontent in rural areas. When the Iowa County office opened up to train volunteers several days ago, over 100 people showed up. And in five days, they have gathered well over 50 percent of the total signatures they expected to gather in that county in the entire two months of the process.
I think the Wisconsin effort is going to be more difficult than the Ohio effort was, so here’s VidaLoca’s take on that:
I think you’re right about the task here being harder, for several reasons:
1. Repealing a law, even if successful, is only a one-off: the governor still holds power and can propose new laws and execute new policies. More importantly perhaps, his friends and supporters are still positioned to received the benefits and perks to which they believe themselves entitled. Remove the governor though, and the whole structure comes tumbling down.
2. And again because the law is a one-off, the referendum allows the voter to consider it and nothing else. Whereas a recall is a vote on the governor’s whole record in office; a voter is more apt to say, “well I didn’t like X but on the whole his record has been pretty good”. Or similarly “well he’s not doing a great job but he won the election so we have to just put up with it and vote him out in 2014”.
3. Also, when the election finally rolls around, we have to put up a candidate who’s simply better qualified to hold the office. And we have to organize a better campaign — you can’t beat something with nothing. Whereas with the referendum, it’s pretty much of a binary choice: “yes” vs. “no”.
Against all these obstacles, what we’ve got going for us is the fact that people are furious. Overall I’m cautiously optimistic about our chances of gathering enough petition signatures to force a recall election. Once that starts it’s anybody’s guess how it will go, though. Elections here have a pattern of being close, like +/- 1%-2%. But that’s a topic for another day.
VidaLoca is at a meeting (w/ACORN? Probably!) but he said he’d try to respond in the comments.
IQ
I have no desire to join the anti-Sullivan jihad on IQ, but I will tell you why I dislike the study of IQ so much. It’s because people think it means something, that a higher IQ means you’re “smarter”. People don’t do this with other measurements, they don’t say Willie Gault had a 40 yard time that was three-tenths of a second faster than Jerry Rice, therefore Gault was a better wide receiver than Jerry Rice. But they do say things like that about IQ-type things.
An acquaintance of mine once told me that he thought that Heisenberg could have figured out how to make nuclear bombs if he’d really wanted to since the Allied scientists did and Heisenberg was smarter than they were. The proof that he was smarter was that he had beat some of the Allied scientists in chess.
One of my best friends was a world-class math problem solver, on the Romanian Olympiad (often the strongest in the world) team several times. As an adult, he is also an excellent math researcher. He tells me that he has always done terribly on IQ type tests because when they say “what’s the next number here” or whatever, his mind says “it could be anything, that’s not much of a pattern there yet”.
I just don’t understand the need to take the human mind, in all its glory and potential, and reduce it to a number based on some stupid test that people made up. It makes me sad that some people want to view human intellectual promise (and even accomplishment) that way. We may suck as a species, but we are also the species of Michelangelo and Newton and Shakespeare and the rest (sorry to name only western men here, I don’t know intellectual history very well, and these are the names that came to mind). Maybe we should ignore that because who knows how they would have done on an IQ test.
It’s strange to me that people who obsess about “racial” differences in IQ are the same people who think we should ignore GDP projections, the holes in Paul Ryan’s budget plans, atmospheric temperature readings etc. because only an un-Burkean fool thinks he can figure out the truth from “data”.
Post Turkey Open Thread
After eating turkey and leftovers for every meal since Thursday, I am so excited to eat tacos tonight that I am salivating.
I have no clue what I’m talking about, but that’s not gonna stop me
Oh, my. Read this:
Well, yes, I do tend to get concerned when politics cramps research and when certain facts are suppressed. And the subtle but clear differences in IQ between broad racial groups are a reality – across country and continent and world. They do not only persist when controlling for economic class, on some measures, they increase. Now, this is only the first baby step in the discussion, but it strikes me as the most important one. And it is this finding – staring right out at us from vast amounts of data that no one disputes – that prompts the question: why? At least that’s what I can say for myself. I had no interest in this subject until I saw the data in Murray’s and Herrnstein’s book. I was, frankly, astounded by it. As a highly educated person, I had never been exposed to this data. And yet, it turned out it was undisputed. Merely the interpretation of it was open to real and important debate.
Then just read this and enjoy the whole thing. If this follows the same pattern as it has for everything else, like the “Ryan plan is serious” episode and too many other to count, we’ve got a couple more days of him digging in before slowing backing down as the bigger guns start to weigh in.
I have no clue what I’m talking about, but that’s not gonna stop mePost + Comments (194)
Rescue Dog Bleg (Central Illinois Area)
I’m attaching 2 pictures of Clayton, who was 10 minutes away from euthanasia when I contacted the rescue people and told them I could foster him. He’s a medium sized young boy, appears to be a shep mix (with a chow grandparent?) who was picked up as a stray in central IL. He’s a good guy, walks nicely on a leash, likes other dogs and seems OK with cats but he hasn’t really been close to mine so I’m not sure. He knows some commands and is a pretty calm dog for his age, which I’m guessing is just under a year old. Until he feels settled, he vocalizes a fake “growl” to let people know he’s not sure about stuff, but he’s shown no aggressive behavior at all. Clayton is a devoted companion, sitting at your feet when you’re reading or watching TV and sleeping on the floor by the bed when you sleep. He’d be a perfect companion for an older person or couple who need a fairly low maintenance dog and are familiar enough with dogs to watch his body language and not be thrown when he vocalizes. Did I mention he’s a snuggler? He will be neutered on Thursday, has all his shots.
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Anyway, anyone on the blog who thinks they know of a good home for Clayton can contact me at [email protected]. Transport can be arranged in the Midwest. I appreciate any help anyone can offer finding a forever home for Clayton, because he’s a wonderful dog.
If you’ve got suggestions, you can also email me by clicking on my name near the top of the right-hand column.
And Iran
Heard a lot of reports of explosions in Iran the past few weeks, and I remember reading Iran threatening to send thousands of missiles into Israel if attacked, and now this:
Iranian protesters screaming “death to England!” stormed the vast British embassy compound and a diplomatic residence in Tehran on Tuesday, tore down the British flag, smashed windows and ransacked the offices in what appeared to be an officially sanctioned protest of Britain’s particularly tough economic sanctions against Iran over its suspect nuclear energy program.
The assault, reported by Iranian news services and broadcast on Iranian television, was the most serious breach between Britain and Iran in more than 20 years, and the images evoked memories of the siege of the American Embassy following the Iranian revolution of 1979.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary, William Hague, expressed outrage over the mayhem, said Britain held Iran’s government responsible and promised “other, further and serious consequences.”
Mr. Hague said in a statement that both British compounds had been stormed by “several hundred people, putting the safety of our diplomats and their families at risk and causing extensive damage to our property.” All British staff were accounted for, he said, without making direct reference to Iranian news agency reports that six had been briefly held hostage, but the status of some local staff remained unclear.
Why the British? And does anyone have a firm grasp as to what is going on over there? I’m really not in the mood for World War III and another oil shock.
Also, who will be the first wingnut to blame this on Obama? My money is on someone from the Weekly Standard or Jennifer Rubin.