Bill Maher at his best

...golf, hamburgers, and religion are all things that are incredibly bad for the environment.

BREAKING: President-elect Obama arrested by the Grammar Police

Obama in today's press conference:

Well, President Bush graciously invited Michelle and I to -- to meet with him and First Lady Laura Bush. We are gratified by the invitation. I'm sure that, in addition to taking a tour of the White House, there's going to be a substantive conversation between myself and the president.

This is the kind of grammar up with which I will not put. (Yes, I know the irony of this paraphrase. It's intentional. Snarky responses are preempted.) I expect my president to speak English better than I, an immigrant from a country most Americans can't find on a map.

Besides the felony of using "I" as a direct object, the president-elect has also been charged with stylistic misdemeanors of using unnecessary and awkward passive voice where "We are grateful for the invitation" would sound better and have a clearer meaning, and saying "between myself and the president" where "between the president and me" would be the minimally acceptable improvement, but we should expect no less than a complete rephrasing, such as "...I'm going to have a substantive conversation with the president."

The "tour of the White House" jab has been noted as evidence of good character, possibly mitigating the charges.

'Scuse me while I kiss this guy

Hey, if there are no Blue States and Red States, then they are all a Purple Haze and I am allowed to misquote Jimi Hendrix lyrics. Anyway, how could you not love this guy:

The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, "I don't consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.' So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f---ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'."

Yes, Virginia, there are stupid questions! What makes that conversation dear to my heart is that I became 100% sold on Obama when I saw him challenge debate moderators with responses like "I reject the premise of this question..." (I had preferred him from the beginning, but that assured me he was the no-BS leader we needed.)

Turns out I was also right about Hillary back in June. Newsweek:

On the night she officially lost the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton enjoyed a long and friendly phone conversation with McCain. Clinton was actually on better terms with McCain than she was with Obama. Clinton and McCain had downed shots together on Senate junkets; they regarded each other as grizzled veterans of the political wars and shared a certain disdain for Obama as flashy and callow.

I would have voted for her had she been the nominee, but I am so glad she is not our new president-elect!

P.S. I don't know how I feel about these embargoed-until-after-election reports. It's nice to find out some inside information, but it is against the spirit of reporting. Shouldn't the people who recorded this stuff be called historians rather than journalists? (That's not irrelevant. I am pretty sure Newsweek's reporters earn more than most historians.)

Does Obama oppose same-sex marriage?

A commenter to this post keeps insisting on false equivalences based on Obama's stated lack of support for gay marriage. Bullshit. First, the obvious: Obama spoke clearly against California's Proposition 8, which proves that he is even less supportive of opposition to gay marriage. But let's think about this issue a bit deeper. Obama could support gay marriage all he wanted, but there is nothing he could do as president to institute it. Marriage is not a matter of federal policy. At least, it is not supposed to be; however, conservatives (who are for "states' rights" when the states are bigoted, but apparently not otherwise) have tried to change the Constitution to define marriage as heterosexual only. And back in 1996, when the public opinion was much less enlightened, they passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) with significant bipartisan support. So what is Obama's position on DOMA?

Here's Glenn Greenwald:

Some appear not to know that a candidate (named "Barack Obama") who has repeatedly and emphatically vowed to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act -- and who called it an "abhorrent law" -- just won a national election in a landslide. And, in the very widely watched Vice-Presidential debate, this is what his Vice Presidential candidate, Joe Biden, said:

Do I support granting same-sex benefits? Absolutely positively. Look, in an Obama-Biden administration, there will be absolutely no distinction from a constitutional standpoint or a legal standpoint between a same-sex and a heterosexual couple. . . .

It's what the Constitution calls for. And so we do support it. We do support making sure that committed couples in a same-sex marriage are guaranteed the same constitutional benefits as it relates to their property rights, their rights of visitation, their rights to insurance, their rights of ownership as heterosexual couples do. . . . there should be no civil rights distinction, none whatsoever, between a committed gay couple and a committed heterosexual couple.

That's what repeal of Section 3 of DOMA would enable -- treating opposite-sex and same-sex couples exactly equally. That's all it would do; it would not re-define "marriage."

So in every way that matters, the Obama-Biden administration is committed (in the sense of clearly stated campaign promises) to equal rights for same-sex couples. True, they will not force the individual states to allow same-sex couples to marry (And how could they? The President has no such constitutional authority.) but they have clearly promised not to stand in the way of same-sex marriage when states choose to allow it.

TAKS and KKK effects

The TAKS effect: Every state that starts with "T", "A", "K" or "S" voted for McCain. There are 10 such states and they comprise 98 electoral votes. McCain won those states' popular vote by a margin of 14%.

Eliminate TAKS, and the rest of the country voted for Obama by a 10% margin (compared to the 6% for the whole country). The electoral vote count is 349-64 (with 27 yet to be determined).

The KKK effect: Every state with a "K" in its name voted for McCain. There are 8 such states and they have 41 electoral votes; McCain has won 40, while one from Nebraska is still uncertain. McCain won those states by 19%.

Eliminate KKK, and the rest of the country voted for Obama by an 8% margin, with the electoral vote count is 349-122 (with 26 yet to be determined).

Eliminate both TAKS and KKK, and Obama wins by 11% and 349-50 electoral votes (with 26 pending). Additionally, the 55-40 advantage in the Senate becomes 49-21, and the 245-157 advantage in the House becomes 219-121. (Pending seats not counted.)

Well, Mr. President, you may say there are no red states and blue states, but there sure are TAKS states and KKK states, and they don't like you very much. The rest of the country looks pretty normal.

UPDATE (many months later): Oops, not every state with a "K" voted for McCain. Thanks to Samer for correcting me.

We're rednecks, we're rednecks, and we're keepin' the n*****s down

How did Buchanan, Will and Limbaugh not think of this:

Of course! Colin Powell is a secret Muslim. Those Jamaicans, they are all Muslims. Look at the name of the Olympic champion in 100 meters dash: Usain Bolt. That's like Hussein. I bet Colin Powell's middle name is Muhammad!

And those Jamaicans who are not Muslim are pot-smoking Ethiopians. Ergo, Colin Powell is a secret pot-smoking Muslim Ethiopian! Of course he is for Obama!

(Next: Is Christopher Buckley secretly the black child William F. Buckley fathered out of wedlock?)

Dog almost bites man

John McCain had a prepared response to Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama. He told Chris Wallace that four former Secretaries of State had endorsed him - Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, James Baker, and Lawrence Eagleburger. I guess it is breaking news that Republican politicians have endorsed the Republican candidate... But wait! There is something newsworthy in that statement.

Where is George Shultz?

Has he not endorsed McCain? That would be quite interesting. He did sign that "100 Economists for McCain" letter (apparently the most famous document with a number in base 9 in its title). Was he one of the signers who didn't quite read what they were signing?

Or did McCain forget to mention him? That would also be interesting, although for different reasons. If any Republican Secretary of State's endorsement, other than Powell's, would mean anything to independents and moderates, it would be Shultz's.

I picked the wrong week to quit cutting taxes

The world has changed a lot in the last month, so let me back off my appeal to the candidates to break their tax-cutting promises. This is not the time to think about long-term fiscal responsibility. That must wait until we are out of the recession.

However, I hope there will be many years of Obama presidency after we are out of the recession, and I hope Obama will have the wisdom to break his promise then, and the charisma to convince the American people not to hate him for that broken promise.

Barack Obama stole my puppy

Barack Obama Stole My Puppy is a great new blog dedicated to collecting "personal stories of real Americans (from small towns, not those big city cesspools) of encounters with the Democratic nominee for president". How well do we really know how horrible Barack Obama is?

I thought of leaving my story in a comment, but this is a meme worth spreading, so I'll write here and I hope that at least one of the three people reading this blog will write about their own experience, and this will spread like a chain letter and soon everybody will see what a spammer Barack Obama is.

So please write your own personal stories, just don't forget to credit Barack Obama Stole My Puppy with the monstrous mutation that created this meme.

And here is my horrible, terrible, no good, bad story:

Barack Obama Made a Potty Mouth of Me

One awful day when I was the tender young age of seven and Barack Obama was a mean thirteen, we were traveling on a bus together. How we got to travel together, I don't recall. Either he threw my Mom and Dad under the bus or he ate them; the events I will describe left me so traumatized that I don't know who my parents were. And I think Barack Obama erased my memory, just so I would never remember the time I was better off than I am now.

Anyway, I was a little nervous so I was kicking the seat in front of me, when an old man who was sitting in it turned around and said "Get off my back, you bratty little fucker!" Imagine a seven-year old small town boy being exposed to those words - and Barack Obama didn't cover my ears!

A few minutes later, I was watching the young woman next to the old man playing with the old man's hair. I asked Barack Obama why the mean old man's daughter was petting his head, and he told me he thought she was his wife. I looked at him and asked, "You mean, they have sex and make babies together?" And Barack Obama said "Yeah, I think so." Eeeeygghhh! Yuck! I felt I had been exposed to a pedophile, and Barack Obama didn't even put his hand over my eyes!

Then the woman told the mean old man that his hair was thinning out, and he started yelling. He roared: "At least I don't plaster on makeup like a trollop, cunt!" Everybody in the bus turned and looked at them, which means also at us, as we were sitting right behind them. That made me nervous; I knew I had just heard something I wasn't supposed to hear. So I asked Barack Obama what a "trollop" was, and he said, smirking, "Hey, you should ask about 'cunt' first!" Can you imagine!? "Cunt first!" Until that day I was a good small-town boy who went to church and target practice every Sunday, and now I was suddenly forced to grow up and become a prisoner of sin and blasphemy - and all because of Barack Obama!

I have been a prisoner of Wicked And Revolting language - a prisoner of WAR, for short - all my life, and I am so wretched that I can't get up in the morning or go to sleep without swearing at somebody. It was Barack Obama who traumatized me so, when I was just seven, that I will never get that awful phrase "Cunt first!" out of my head. And now Barack Obama made it worse because he is running for President, and that other guy who is also running for President - see how Barack Obama influences people, they want to immitate him and do the same bad things he does - yeah, that other guy, he keeps saying something that sounds like "Cunt first!" all the time, and he looks like the mean old man on the bus, and I can't escape from the prison of turpitude in which Barack Obama locked me up that awful day when I was the tender young age of seven.

4 out of 5 economists recommend Obama

The Economist, a conservative publication, says so.

Voters deserve better actuaries

Bragg is promoting his actuarial analysis of McCain and Obama again:

McCain would be the oldest president to begin a first term in office. By the end of a second term, Jan. 20, 2017, he would have a 24.44 percent chance of dying, compared with 5.76 percent for Obama, the firm estimates.

As far as I can tell, those numbers seriously understate the difference in the candidates' respective longevity prospects.

Let's start from the average mortality, given only the candidates' age and sex. McCain is 72 years and 32 days old and he will be 80 years and 144 days old on January 20, 2017. Using Social Security's life tables, his probability of dying before the end of his second term is 32.2%. Barack Obama is 47 years and 57 days old; his probability of dying by the same day, which in his case is age 55 years and 169 days, is 4.3%.

(Non-geeks may skip this paragraph: I used the 1940 cohort table for McCain and 1960 cohort table for Obama. Those are the closest to their birth years. Those choices favor McCain by the amount of mortality improvement from his 1936 cohort to the 1940 cohort. The difference is hardly negligible: using the 1930 cohort, we'd get 34.7% for the same ages, and linear interpolation yields approximately 33.2%, so the result I used is biased in McCain's favor by about 1 percentage point. Similarly, using 1960 cohort mortality for Obama introduces a slight - although almost negligible in this case - bias against Obama. One further geek note: I derived all survival probabilities by linear interpolation between nearest integer-year ages. That is more than accurate enough for the purpose of this analysis.)

Of course, there is more information available about the candidates, and Bragg lists some factors used:

He classified the Democrat as a smoker with minor upper respiratory problems, probably linked to his smoking. Obama announced in February that he was trying to quit smoking again, with the aid of nicotine gum.

"We don't consider you a nonsmoker until you stay quit for 12 months," said Brooks.

In the spring, the Obama campaign released a letter from the candidate's doctor declaring him to be in excellent health. He had very good cholesterol levels, his EKG was normal, his pulse was 60 beats per minute, and his blood pressure was an outstanding 90 over 60. Obama also exercises regularly.

But Obama has a family history of cancer. His mother died of ovarian cancer and his maternal grandfather died of prostate cancer. Obama's PSA screening test for prostate cancer showed no sign of abnormalities.

For the Republican, Brooks took into account a history of skin cancer, degenerative arthritis from his Vietnam war injuries, moderately high cholesterol, mild vertigo and that McCain is a former smoker who quit in 1980.

McCain allowed reporters to review eight years of medical records, more than 1,000 pages. They show that he is cancer-free, has a strong heart and is generally in good health. As a three-time melanoma survivor, his biggest health worry is a recurrence of that cancer. But he is closely watched by his dermatologist, and any future melanoma should be caught in time to be treated successfully. McCain maintains a healthy weight and blood pressure, and takes medication for his cholesterol.

That is hardly an unbiased account, and the statement that "McCain allowed reporters to review eight years of medical records" is, at best, barely true. In any case, the factors mentioned in the article should be worse news for McCain than for Obama.

Let's start with smoking. It is true that Obama wouldn't qualify for non-smoker rates if he applied for a life insurance policy today, but life insurance underwriting imposes rather crude discrete categories by necessity. (Verification is costly and the potential for cheating is high; for example, someone who smokes two packs a day could claim to smoke one pack a week.) This individualized analysis can do much better than that. Obama's quitting has not been entirely successful, but he is clearly closer to a former smoker than to a current one. McCain stopped smoking years ago, but he used to smoke two packs a day for 25 years. So they have a similar smoking history and quit at a similar age. By itself, this factor would make each of them more likely to die than an average man of their age. The effect is probably greater for Obama mainly because fewer men of his age are smokers, so average mortality for his cohort is based on a higher percentage of non-smokers. I would be curious to see what factors Bragg applied to account for smoking history.

(Another note for wonks: Insurers generally charge smokers double or even higher rates than nonsmokers, and that is soundly based on experience, but those factors apply to a baseline of the insured population, i.e., to the people who have passed other underwriting hurdles. For example, by the Society of Actuaries' 90-95 Basic Select tables, a male smoker of Obama's age would have about 3.5% chance of dying in the next 8 years, which is better than the average from the Social Security tables. Similarly, a smoker of McCain's age would have 23% chance of dying in the next 8 years, again better than in the SSA tables. Another thing to keep in mind is that, in insurance underwriting, smoking also serves as a proxy to other risky behavior, which means that not all of the excess mortality of smokers is caused by smoking.)

The candidates' fitness balances their smoking history. Both candidates seem to have healthy hearts, and Obama's pulse and blood pressure cited by Bragg are impressive. Obama is thin and McCain's weight is normal. They both seem significantly more fit than average men of their respective ages. Fitness-related mortality patterns are far less well known than smoking-related ones, but my guess would be that both candidates make up in fitness about as much as they lose from smoking history. Additionally, both are married and have (as far as we know) healthy spouses, which also improves their longevity prospects. Not to mention that both have access to best available health care.

So far, very similar adjustments to age/sex baseline apply to both candidates, but the rest is all bad news for McCain. Melanoma is a serious type of cancer, prone to metastasizing that is hard to detect and treat. It is true that McCain has been free of symptoms for 8 years and that it improves his prognosis, but the fact that he's had 4 episodes of melanoma, and that the last one was over 2 mm deep, raise additional concerns. For lesions like his last one, 5-year survival rate is 63-79% and 10-year 51-64%. He has survived for 8 years, so the greatest risk is behind him, but he is not out of the woods:

“With melanoma, a patient is never completely clear,” said Dr. Shapiro, the N.Y.U. expert.

If melanomas do recur, standard treatment options are limited for many to surgery and a difficult form of chemotherapy. The chances of long-term survival diminish.

Precise estimates aren't available, but it is hard to see how McCain's chance of dying from this one cause alone would be less than 10% over the next 8 years.

Another issue for McCain is the long-term effects of maltreatment by the Vietcong. Five and a half years of injuries, torture and malnutrition certainly have health consequences. Quantifying the effect is difficult, but that's not a good reason to ignore it altogether.

In summary, there is little reason to think that Obama's probability of dying in the next 8 years exceeds that of an average man of his age - 4.3 percent. In fact, it is probably less than 3.5 percent, the number based on life insurance policy experience. On the other hand, I don't see how McCain's probability of dying in the same period would be much less than one-third. In other words, McCain is at least 9 times as likely to die in office as Obama. Bragg tells us it is not quite 4.5 times. Unless he publishes more details about the calculation and the assumptions, I can't see how his results could be justified.

UPDATE: It is probably wrong to focus on survival to the end of second term. Incumbency is an advantage in an election, but we don't elect a President for 8 years, and we would (hopefully) have updated health information before the next election. Going back to the baseline (Social Security tables), a man of McCain's age has 15.4% chance of dying before January 20, 2013, and a man of Obama's age has 2.0% chance of dying in the same period. By the way, the shorter the period we look at, the more significant a factor McCain's cancer is, because the probability of recurrence goes down the longer he's already survived.

Thoughts on the first BHO-JSM debate

I thought both candidates did well as far as debate performance goes, and they both succeeded in projecting the types of persona that have defined their respective candidacies so far. Obama appeared serious, thoughtful, assertive and "presidential" (whatever that means, but there is nearly a consensus about that characterization). McCain was the same avuncular elder statesman he was in his acceptance speech (which I still think was a success, despite what almost all the pundits say), friendly to the audience but aggressive toward enemies. McCain's problem is that he counts his opponent among those enemies, which works great at the Republican convention, but not so great in front of a diverse audience and face-to-face with the opponent.

My prediction - which now appears too pessimistic - was that the debate would not change the poll numbers. I thought both candidates scored some important points with concerned leaners. Those who already prefer Obama, but worry about his lack of experience and doubt his leadership ability, were certainly reassured by his confidence, poise, and control of issues. And those who already prefer McCain, but worry that he may be losing his mind because of his recent erratic decisions and apparent episodes of confusion, were reassured that he is still able to think quickly on his feet and stay focused for 90 minutes. I thought the two effects would approximately balance and that the free fall of McCain's numbers would end in a cushioned landing (although without a bounce).

In thinking about the effect of the debate on the election, I try to ignore the substantive points because I assume that a vast majority of undecided voters are so uninformed that they are unable to assess those points critically and intelligently. The same holds for McCain's lies and misconceptions - I assume that anybody who has not yet realized that McCain is a pathological liar and that most of his economic and foreign policy ideas are sophomoric is not able to draw any such conclusions from the debate. And I still think those assumptions are correct.

Where I think I was wrong, though, is in discounting the effect of body language. Although early pundits' comments picked up on McCain's avoidance of eye contact, I thought that the significance of body language was hyped up in the media. I based my thinking on the 2000 Gore-Bush debates, when viewers didn't seem to notice Gore's alleged sighs and eye rolling until they were spoonfed those talking points by the media; and I also thought that, as much as McCain has lost the support he once had in "his base", the pundits weren't going to nitpick on his body language as they did on Gore's. What I overlooked was that McCain's physical clues were real, and the kind that people perceive instinctively (as some primate behavior researchers have pointed out).

It was also a rare opportunity to see the candidates standing side-by-side. When you see McCain alone, you can do a mental adjustment for his age and perceive a relatively fit and vigorous man, but that is much more difficult to do when you see him next to his much younger, fitter and - don't underestimate the importance of this - four inches taller opponent.

OK, enough about appearances and the effect on the race; I cannot write a post this long without saying anything about the contents of the debate. But I won't say anything about their disagreements; nobody will be surprised to hear that, whenever the two candidates disagreed, I preferred Obama's position. However, I deplore some of their agreements.

I was disappointed - or rather, I have been disappointed for a while, this is not new - that Obama agreed with McCain on two clearly wrong foreign policy positions: that the surge in Iraq worked, and that Russia bears all the blame for invading Georgia. I am hoping that Obama and Biden are smarter than to adopt those simplistic falsehoods, and that they have only temporarily adopted those talking points because they concluded that now is not the time to try to convince the American people that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Since that would almost certainly be a correct assessment, I have to give them the benefit of the doubt, and hope that the Obama-Biden administration would be more thoughtful than they are willing to show now.

Of course, even in the worst case (that they really agree with those statements), they would not be any worse than the alternative, and on a host of other issues the alternative is simply unthinkable.

UPDATE: Yep, I hear "Horseshit!" in this clip.

The sensible bipartisan center is solidly Democratic

A must-read case for Obama (and against McCain) from Brad DeLong, economist and one of the smartest people in America:

What reason could there be not to vote against a candidate who says he doesn't know very much about economics? Not to vote against a candidate whose two chief economic advisors are Phil "What Problems with Deregulation, You Whiners?" Gramm and Carly "H-P Paid Me $21 Million to Go Away" Fiorina. All signs are that McCain economic policy is set to be much worse than even George W. Bush policy--unless Douglas Holtz-Eakin could win the fight inside the White House snakepit. But I don't think he could: McCain regards Gramm and Fiorina--not Doug--as peers to be deferred to. I would be happy to be proven wrong if we take the gamble, but it's not a gamble I want us to take.

Obama: "Read my lips!"

I don't like this pledge not to raise taxes. You can't restore fiscal balance by taxing only the rich, and then not even them too much. Are Americans really that stupid and immature that they won't vote for anyone who doesn't promise to burden their children with huge debt cut their taxes?

Yes, Obama's plan is a lot better than McCains. Trillions better. The choice between the two is clear. But it is sad that we are not even offered the choice of a fiscally responsible plan. It's like a small car in the 1990s - there just isn't a market for that product in America. It took $4 gas for Americans to discover small cars; what amount of national debt will it take to discover fiscal discipline?

According to Tax Policy Center, Obama's plan would increase revenues by $600 billion over the next 10 years relative to "current policy", while McCain's plan would reduce revenues by a similar amount. Here, "current policy" means extending the Bush tax cuts; if we compare to current law, in which those tax cuts expire in 2011, we are talking about revenue losses of $2.9 trillion (Obama) or $4.2 trillion (McCain). And that's not even counting their health care proposals, which are harder to compare side-by-side (McCain's would lose another $1.3 trillion in revenues; Obama's would mostly affect the spending side).

My message to whoever gets elected: please, please break your tax promises!

FactCheck.org needs fact checking

On August 19, FactCheck.org reported:

An Obama ad uses dated and out of context quotes to portray McCain as clueless on the economy.

Obama's offense? McCain's statements that the economy is strong and that we are not heading toward recession were several months old; the economic situation has changed since then, and so has McCain's assessment of it.

Except that McCain's assessment hasn't changed by an iota.

Here’s John McCain on August 20 talking to Laura Ingraham: “I still believe the fundamentals of our economy are strong.”

McCain proved FactCheck.org wrong the day after they criticized Obama. Three weeks later, FactCheck.org has not published a correction.

UPDATE: David Neiwert finds FactCheck sloppy on Palin's AIP connection.

Is Hawaii in US and A, anyway?

There's the real reason the Constitution requires the President to be a US citizen by birth: we don't want to allow candidates to take those elitist trips home. Imagine, for example, if Arnold Schwarzenegger went to Austria! Who does he think he is? Mozart? A celebrity? Un-American? (Question for homework: Why would this not work?)

Note to aspiring candidates: if you want to run for President, make sure you are born in Dead Possum Hole, Redneck State, and you go there for vacation. Alternatively, you can run as a Republican.

Presidential terms and actuarial errors

Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the actuarial firm John M. Bragg & Associates has estimated the healthy life expectancy - average remaining life free of Alzheimer's or other impairments requiring an assisted living facility - for John McCain and Barack Obama. Bragg gives McCain a health expectancy of 8.4 years, and Obama 21.9 years, and offers the following conclusion:

“Either candidate can be expected to serve two full terms, without age or health being an issue,” said John M. Bragg, the firm chairman.

John Aravosis points out that Bragg's numbers don't add up:

The actuarial (sic) says McCain has 8.4 "healthy" years left. He mistakenly drew the conclusion that McCain would therefore be healthy through two terms in office, thinking that eight years from now is the end of McCain's term. That's incorrect. The end of the term is in 8 years 5.5 months from now. Statistically, that means McCain won't make it through two terms as a "healthy" president. By healthy, he means “the person does not require the care provided by an assisted living facility and is free of Alzheimer’s disease.”

By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, that means McCain wouldn't even be able to complete two full terms in office. His time runs out on December 30th or so of 2016, a good three weeks before the new president would be sworn in. So that means, statistically speaking, before the end of two terms, we should expect President McCain to have to be moved to a retirement home because he'll no longer be able to care for himself, and we should expect that he'll already be suffering from Alzheimer's.

Aravosis is correct in noting that 8.4 years from now does not give the new President (whoever it is) two full terms. His explanation of what that means is a little sloppy, but the end result is most likely correct. The issue is what it means that "we should expect" McCain (not) to be healthy and alive by the end of the two terms. I assume that Aravosis means "it is more likely than not", but that doesn't follow so simply from the published statistic.

Mathematical expectation is the theoretical mean, not median. What it means is the following: if we had a thousand men of the same age and other relevant characteristics as John McCain, we follow them all until they die and note how long each lives, and then we sum up all of their times from now until death, and divide the result by 1000 (the number of them), we will get something very close to 8 years, 146 days.

It does not mean that 500 of them will live longer than 8.4 years and the other 500 shorter. That would follow only if the remaining lifetime were distributed symmetrically, for example, if it followed the bell-shaped normal distribution. But that is not the case: all remaining lifetimes must be greater than zero, but there is no reason some of them couldn't be 30 years or more. The expectation (8.4 years) is obviously not in the middle of the range, so the distribution is skewed (asymmetric).

Now it turns out that, in most distributions of this kind (with a "tail" on the right), the median is less than the mean. If the median healthy survival is less than 8.4 years, it would mean that fewer than 500 of the initial 1000 "McCain clones" would have more than 8.4 years of healthy life - and, obviously, even fewer would have 8.46 or so years needed to complete two terms in office. So Aravosis made a correct statement, after all.

If Aravosis is correct, Bragg must be incorrect. It is not possible to say, based on Bragg's own numbers, that McCain "can be expected to serve two full terms, without age or health being an issue". Because the median is almost certainly lower than the mean, it would not be true even if the expected healthy life were somewhat longer, say 8.5 years, extending beyond two terms. It would still imply that McCain is more likely than not to die or become seriously impaired before the end of the second term.

But this error in arithmetic is not the most bothersome part of Bragg's statement. After all, if all the critique amounted to were nitpicking about chances being 49% rather than 51%, it would be rather academic. I see a far more serious problem in Bragg's choice of risk measure.

Suppose for a moment that Bragg's arithmetic was right, and that McCain could be expected, albeit barely so, to be alive and healthy on January 20, 2017. Suppose his chances are 55%. That's a generous "improvement" of Bragg's estimate, but it still means a 45% chance he would be dead or incapacitated. Would most people be comfortable with a president facing those odds? Would most people, upon hearing that number, characterize a potential McCain presidency as "without age or health being an issue"? I doubt that. From the risk management point of view, Bragg has cited an almost useless statistic.

John M. Bragg is not just any actuary. He was President of the Society of Actuaries. That, however, was a long time ago, when the US President was named Gerald Ford.

What the "Celeb" ad really says

Wondering WTF that McCain's ad was about? Confused by talking heads discussing who "played the race card"? I am starting a new service for my readers: subliminal-to-abominable translation. What used to be between the lines is now clearly spelled out, line by line. Watch the enhanced "Celeb" ad:

Facts should be reeducated

The most pernicious mass delusion in America is the delusion that the mainstream media have a liberal bias. The most recent instance is documented in a Gallup poll:

Americans are more than twice as likely to say media coverage of Obama is unfairly positive as to say it is unfairly negative. For McCain, the opposite is true, with many more seeing coverage of him as unfairly negative than as unfairly positive.

This is as absurd as believing that grizzly bears are harmless fuzzy friends who like to be petted, or that red hair is a sign of moral depravity. It is extremely well documented that the media have avoided challenging McCain's false statements or even cut his most preposterous gaffes out of interviews. There is no way to characterize the belief that the media are unfairly negative in their coverage of McCain as anything other than delusional.

But why are Americans so stupid? Why do they so readily embrace this ludicrous myth of the liberally-biased media? How is it possible for those who spread the lies to convince most people all the time? (Note that the belief is not limited to Republicans or conservatives or McCain supporters: a fifth of intended Obama voters also believe that the media coverage of McCain has been unfairly negative.)

I think it's the fault of those goddamn liberally-biased facts. For decades, the Republican candidates have consistently been so much dumber, meaner, and more dishonest than their Democratic counterparts that it is hard for most people to believe that such pervasive differences are real. Surely, God created the two parties equal, so the vast difference in quality must be an illusion created by the media.

This has an interesting corollary: the best way for the Right to perpetuate the myth is to support incompetent, cranky, and mendacious candidates. And if that's part of the plan, then all I can say is, they are getting more and more successful!

UPDATE: I just found this Daily Kos diary, which discusses the same issue and shows every step of the reasoning - user-friendly for the pedestrians.

That's why he doesn't wear a button!

Jesus' General made my day and built my barn.

And "Amish" is just another word for "gangsta". Just ask Weird Al.