Politify: Find Out How Your Candidate's Policies Will Affect You

I came across a fascinating tool on Twitter. Politify purports to show you the impact a presidential candidate's policies will have on a personal, local, and national level. It's a slick and cool-looking tool and the people behind it are fairly open about the sources they use in putting it together. So I took it for a spin and took a look at how Barak Obama and Mitt Romney's policies would affect me and my three most recent home towns.

The results were quite dramatic. And quite skewed:

Haltom City, TX

Plainfield, IL

Chicago, IL

I must admit to a bit of schadenfreude at seeing my staunchly Republican brother's conservative enclave of Plainfield so heavily benefitted by Obama's policies. For that matter, I also got a kick out of seeing my new home of Haltom City in the midst of the red as can be state of Texas awash in a see of Democratic blue. (Here, the intensity of the red and blue colors which represent the Republican and Democratic parties respectively are meant to show how many people benefit from which party nominee's policies not how the areas are expected to vote.) But it was shocking to see nevertheless.

Nationwide, the results were similarly skewed:

Nationwide

Of course you might at this point, yell "Bias! Bias!" And maybe you'd be right. But I've been scratching my head over Romney for months, wondering what he's trying to do other than cut his own taxes. While Politify may or may not be biased for one side or the other, I for one am inclined to believe its results. Perhaps that's just because I was already leaning for Obama anyway but I don't see any reason to doubt their results right now.

Try it and see what results you get....

SuperPACking

SuperPACs Are Bad Until You Need Their Money for Your Reelection Campaign.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Colbert Super PAC - Nancy Pelosi's Ad & Barack Obama's Super PAC
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The Funniest Line I've Seen on Slashdot in a Long Time

Right here.

He Makes Them Look Bad Too

Say what you will about our president. His extravagant dates with his wife may make the average American husband look bad but think what how they make husbands in other countries look....

Recovery.gov—Access Problems For The Government's New Website?

The Obama administration has finally pushed its stimulus bill through Congress and has a website for it up and running. Hooray for government transparency and change you can believe in. I was pretty eager to read the bill. Actually, I probably would have just skimmed it for a few minutes and gotten bored the way I did with the House version of the bill. But I was definitely interested in looking at it if for no reason than because it was available online. While Congress has been making the text of bills available in excruciating detail for years, as far as I know this was the first time that the president went to such pains to actually publicize and build websites for a single law. The website was actually live (empty but live) for at least a week before the stimulus bill passed.

So I eagerly went to the website today and was excited to see a polished, professional, and good looking website along with a link to full text of the stimulus bill. Awesome! Then I actually clicked on the link. Nothing. Apparently, JavaScript coders are also getting a stimulus package. I use NoScript to disable scripting on websites by default in Firefox. Most websites work just fine with Javascript turned off and given how common it is these days for malicious websites to download malware onto your computer, it just makes sense for me. But I guess I can trust the government right? It's not like a politician has ever lied to me.

So I enabled JavaScript for recovery.gov and it popped up a message telling me that I was leaving the recovery.gov server displaying the full text of the link which it is sending me to. Is this really necessary? After all, the full text of any link is displayed on a browser's status bar anyway—or at least it would be if somebody hadn't decided to hide the link behind a JavaScript pop up. Still I clicked through and was taken to a the white house website where the bill conveniently divided into five parts and available in available in either PDF or ASCII formats. Excellent! Then I actually clicked on something. Another pop up. So I enable JavaScript for whitehouse.gov and click again and nothing. Aaargh! So I try one more time. Taking note of URL and enable JavaScript gpo.gov (the Government Printing Office?) and click again and nothing.

I tried to access the website again with Google Chrome and Internet Explorer. I used a brand new computer where IE had JavaScript turned on and Chrome always has JavaScript enabled but I still got the same results. Maybe the government's servers are just overwhelmed by people trying to look at the stimulus bill but if that's not the case....Between these three browsers, I probably have at least 95% of all Internet users covered and I'm a bit worried. Sure, the Bush administration screwed up Afghanistan, Iraq, and Hurricane Katrina but I've just received some very disturbing evidence that the Obama administration can't even get a simple website right.

I really hope I missed something....

Update: Checking in on the website again, it looks like they changed things around a bit. You can now download the full stimulus bill, as signed by the president, in PDF format and actually looks pretty good. Yet another document for me to download and not read. You still have to go through the annoying pop ups but at least you can download it and look at it now. My faith in democracy is restored....

What Will It Be Like to Have a Black President?

FARK takes a look at that question with this classic Richard Pryor clip:

Election 2008 In Photoshop

As the election draws to a close, I thought I'd post some of the many photoshop pictures that I've collected )mostly on FARK because it's so much easier to post a bunch of silly pictures than to make cogent, logical arguments to justify your political opinions.

From the hard fought primaries:






A charismatic young leader emerges on one side:



And a grizzled veteran on the other:



And the election had begun in earnest:



Most of the 'shops were pretty geeky:





Others were tailored to the headlines and sound bites of the day:






Some of the 'shops were truly elaborate:




Not all of the funny images were photoshops, some were just unfortunate:



Going negative:




But in the end, a final winner had to emerge:

Google Quotes the Candidates

Neatorama links to a neat new service from Google which tracks quotes by the presidential candidates and other politicians on the issues. Just choose a pair of politicians and type in an issue like the economy and Google pops up quotes from each of them along with links to the news articles which quote them. An excellent tool for voters.

On John McCain And Earmarks

In his recent debate with Barack Obama, John McCain took him to task for his earmarks. He specifically singled out "$3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois." This isn't the first time McCain has mentioned the earmark and a number of science bloggers have complained about McCain's complaints.

There's an insteresting twist to the earmark story. The Adler Planetarium recently released a statement (PDF link) on the debate and it turns out that they never actually received an earmark:

To clarify, the Adler Planetarium requested federal support – which was not funded – to replace the projector in its historic Sky Theater, the first planetarium theater in the Western Hemisphere. The Adler’s Zeiss Mark VI projector – not an overhead projector – is the instrument that re-creates the night sky in a dome theater, the quintessential planetarium experience. The Adler’s projector is nearly 40 years old and is no longer supported with parts or service by the manufacturer. It is only the second planetarium projector in the Adler’s 78 years of operation.

...

However, the Adler has never received an earmark as a result of Senator Obama's efforts. This is clearly evidenced by recent transparency laws implemented by the Congress, which have resulted in the names of all requesting Members being listed next to every earmark in the reports that accompany appropriations bills.

It's interesting to see how the presidential campaign has unfolded over the years (that's right, people have been running for president for two freakin' years). John McCain seems determined to find specific examples of government waste that to attack. Besides the planetarium, McCain has also complained about an earmark for studying bear DNA. But we are talking about relatively small amounts of money compared to the overall federal budget. $3,000,000 may seem like a lot to you and me—and to John McCain but it's nothing compared to the almost $3,000,000,000,000 total federal budget. All of the total earmarks in the federal budget amount to exactly $16,501,833,000—a large number to be sure, but only a fraction of our country's entire federal budget. 

I think that earmarks are a lot like the Mad Magazine cartoon which I've inserted in this post. Most people have trouble visualizing really huge numbers. I certainly do. Earmarks are smaller but nevertheless large chunks of cash which often turn out to be wasteful. They are also highly visible because they are often spent on a things like museums, roads, and bridges. Because of this, earmarks are easy to visualize and can be easily turned into symbols of government waste. But ultimately, they are little more than symbols because most of the federal budget is spent elsewhere.

Harder, Better Barack

I guess it's no surprise that Barack Obama supporters would be hipper than John McCain supporters. But this is probably the coolest of the pro-Obama videos I've seen so far.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Can I Borrow a Meme? Microsoft's New Ad Echos the Election

Maybe I was a little harsh when I suggested that Microsoft is irrelevant. Listening to Leo Laporte's TWiT podcast, I was struck by how thoroughly Leo and his merry band of nerds discuss Microsoft's recent ads. They are after all the same tech journalists who talk about nothing but technology, so in that respect, Microsoft has hit its real target quite effectively. 

Another thing that struck me when listening to Leo's podcast was the tone of the new commercial where the panelists agree that Microsoft sees Apple as elitist. That is indeed how Microsoft contrasts itself with Apple. Apple's "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads are fairly simple, a young hipster represents the Mac and a stiff middle aged man in a cheap suit represents the PC. Microsoft's new ad turns that idea on its head with the "PC" guy introducing all of the "common" people who use PCs. The message couldn't be more clear—Macintoshes are for elitists, PCs are for real people.

That's not the first time we've seen this argument made in an advertisement. In fact, we are seeing this argument in John McCain's ads against Barack Obama. Just about every McCain ad and every utterance from every pundit is calling Obama an elitist. It's the exact same argument you are seeing in the new Microsoft ad—Microsoft has just been more subtle about it. 

Unfortunately for McCain, he is not the first person to try this argument. Hillary Clinton made the same argument against Obama in the primaries and lost. Fortunately for McCain, that argument did work to a certain extent for Hillary as was able to close the gap between Obama and herself using that same argument. McCain also benefits from the fact that the elitist argument has been a successful one for Republicans in the past. George W. Bush used that argument against John Kerry and his father used it successfully against Michael Dukakis.

In the end, all politicians tell the people that they are one of them. The most successful politicians are usually the ones who make the most people believe in "I'm just like you" argument. It's a compelling emotional argument. And it's the reason why every politician styles himself as an outsider—fighting for you against the "establishment" in which they have entrenched themselves. Really, it was only a matter of time before some computer company figured out this moldy, hypocritical argument and used it to promote themselves. Congratulations Microsoft, you've gone where everyone has gone before.

Barack Obama on the Role of Religion in the United States

PZ Myers is a very smart man. He is an evolutionary biologist and a professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He's also a very angry atheist who rails against religion in his blog. He's also fairly humorless and prone to getting into long silly fights with people like cartoonist Scott Adams because he's unable to tell when he's being trolled. He's been having a lot of trouble warming up to Barack Obama because of his religious beliefs. So it was interesting to see him linking to this video of a speech by Barack Obama on religion and diversity which shows a surprisingly smart and nuanced view on the role of Christianity in the United States:

Democrats Continue to Court Nerd Vote

First is was Star Wars. Now it's Monty Python. Salon.com has a parody video made by the Obama campaign which casts Hillary Clinton as the hapless Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Nerds Weigh-In On Presidential Race

So I was reading about astronomy on The Daily Galaxy when I saw that they linked to this video. It's an amusing take on the Democratic presidential primary done in Star Wars terms.