Foundation

Just look. Look at it. It’s the introduction to Mega Man 9!

Heh heh heh. I so badly want this game to be the start of a trend. After Mega Man 9 I want Super Mario Brothers 4, Space Harrier 3, Fantasy Zone 4, and more, more, more!

I do not think it means what you think it means.

Via Josh Treviño, the headline of a Russian newspaper (since changed when the propaganda was exposed): Peacekeepers seize Army base inside Georgia. It now says “leave” instead of “seize,” but you can’t leave a base unless you entered it at some point, could you?

We all must take down the names of anyone who parrots the Russian imperialist (literally, they’re expanding the empire here) point of view that Russia is the peacekeeper and Georgia is the aggressor. The Associated Press, Reuters, anyone. These outlets are the enemies of freedom and must be treated as such.

I look at it this way: What happens to South Ossetia can happen to Southern California. Justice must be served. Georgia must remain intact.

Based on data conveniently aggregated for me by resident poll addict Adam C, I would now like to try to make sense of the recent national polling of the Presidential election, excluding tracking polls which are more useful for measuring movement than status.

The polls included in my survey are as follows:

My conclusion: It’s a close one, with Obama barely ahead. Read on for the why and how.

When reading polling, the eye usually jumps straight to the difference between the two candidates. This is natural, but when it comes to analyzing this series of polls, I think it’s the wrong approach. These polls don’t measure the gap in support, if any, between Senators McCain and Obama. They measure the levels of support for each candidate.

So what are the levels of support? Ideally, to answer that question, we’d like a bunch of polls taken all at the same time, with the same methodology. With that, we could answer that question with a high degree of confidence. However we only have five polls, all taken on different days, with different targeted samples of voters. That skews things: The differences between polls of Registered Voters and polls of Likely voters can be large relative to the gap between the candidates. We go to war with the data we have, though, so let us see what comes out.

There are two ways we can try to pick at this data. One is to try to decide which separate poll is most accurate, the other is to try to aggregate the poll data somehow and take a guess. I’ll try a combination of both. The polls show huge gaps in the number of voters who favor neither Obama nor McCain. Given that the None of the Above vote was 1% in 2004 and 4% in 2000, I believe it safe to assume that it will not top 5% in 2008.

So the gap between 5% and the NOTA rate in any given poll, according to our assumptions, must represent undecided voters. What should that number be in an accurate poll? According to CNN’s 2000 exit polling, 11% of voters decided their votes in the three days before the election. In the 2004 exit polling, 9% chose on the final day or the last three days.

It is true that the exit polls have figures for people who decided a week before or a month before, but those people are thinking about the election in advance. They’re likely to show up in these polls as already having formed opinions, though those opinions may change before election day. I don’t expect people thinking about the election a month ahead not to favor a candidate right now.

So looking at these polls, it appears that CNN and Gallup are getting undecided figures all wrong. As we toss those out, notice that those are the two with the largest leads for each candidate (Gallup with McCain +4, CNN with Obama +7).

Looking at what’s left, we have three polls that show John McCain with 42% support. As for Obama, one shows him with 41%, one with 48%, and one with 47%. So if these polls mean anything, here is the state of the national opinion of voters, in my estimate: McCain 42, Obama 45, NOTA 13. Obama has a three point lead, with 8-12% yet to choose between the two.

That seems awfully close for a “Democratic Year” when in other elections, Democrats have held much larger leads that Republicans successfully erased. It’s no surprise then, that the polling map this year looks so much like the 2000-2004 maps. This one should be close to the wire.

I just made one.

I still won’t buy from them due to the patent behavior, but if others want to buy for me from them, so be it.

For crying out loud, I am sick of Ned Colletti. Does anyone, anyone realisticly think that bringing in this past-his-prime, defensive-embarassment, clubhouse-cancer of an outfielder Manny Ramirez is going to win the Dodgers the World Series? Is he even going to win us one game should we make it to the NLDS?

If not, then the trade is incredibly bad. It’s short-run, win-now thinking that Colletti has shown his whole time in LA. He’s just doing what they did in SF when he was an assistant. The only problem is, it made sense to do that with the Giants, because they could hear the Robb Nen, Jason Schmidt, and Barry Bonds clocks ticking. They had to Win Now™.

The Dodgers have no such stars to worry about, and don’t need to Win Now™. This is a terrible trade mindset, and all it does is drive further down my interest in the Colletti era Dodgers.

Related, Paul Lo Duca has no been released by the Nationals. By the Nationals. And yet we fired Paul DePodesta for trading him. As though it was the fault of not having a scrappy gamer or something caused our outfielder Drew to break his wrist, our shortstop Izturis to need Tommy John surgery, our closer Gagné to wreck his elbow, and our manager (whom DePodesta never got to replace) Tracy to fail to get with the program.

Nice bunch there, that group of players and manager. Where are they all today? I hate the way the Dodgers are run. Business-wise I like what Frank McCourt has done, particularly with his commitment to renovating Dodger Stadium rather than being a whining baby and demanding taxpayer subsidization of a new stadium (though the purist in me regrets the park losing some of its pitcher-friendliness). But baseball-wise, I couldn’t be more unhappy.

If Oakland fans really are sick of Billy Beane, I’ll be glad to trade.

Now we know why Chekhov was so eager to get to Alameda. He wanted a free communicator with built-in phaser without the Starfleet commitment.

Most people, when we sign a contract, we understand that we’re supposed to follow through with what we promise. Contracts are one of the pillars of our economy, without which we would have the mess you see in any lawless banana republic.

Alameda County, California is going bananas though, as a county Superior Court judge has ruled that wireless phone service providers may not enforce their contracts with customers, and people are free to wriggle out of them whenever they want, with no termination fee allowed.

Quoting the Mercury-News:

Californians fed up with being charged for ending their cell phone service prematurely won a major victory in a Bay Area court decision that concluded such fees violate state law.

In a preliminary ruling Monday, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Bonnie Sabraw said Sprint Nextel must pay California mobile-phone consumers $18.2 million as part of a class-action lawsuit challenging early termination fees.

Say goodbye to subsidized hardware, folks, if this ruling isn’t smacked down hard. I hope all the people who enjoyed getting an iPhone cheaply are ready their warmest regards to the the California courts if this forces AT&T to charge full price instead of giving you the hardware cheap with a commitment, because if this ruling is the future, that model just became impossible to sustain.

All about the athletes? Free of politics? Who told you the IOC’s Games were either of those things? When the IOC will ban Iraq from the 2008 Summer Olympics over the politics of bureaucracy, you know there’s something else going on. This is just more national prejudice from a group known for it.

I bet you Zimbabwe, Cuba, and Iran have no trouble getting in, though.

This is just more reason that Americans should start shunning the IOC and all its sham events. Maybe once they meant something, but now there is on patriotism in kowtowing to that corrupt, anti-American institution.

It appears that Rep. Mary Bono Mack has decided she’s done playing the bait-and-switch on California district 45, and is now openly flaunting her leftward drift over the years. Via Red County, Mary Bono Mack is bragging about voting to override President Bush’s veto of runaway socialist spending by the Pelosi-Reid Congress.

It’s no longer enough for her to be a member of the Republican Main Street Partnership, and to have gradually slid away from being the continuation of Sonny Bono’s own representation. Now she’s on the record as being with Pelosi and against Bush, with the Democrats against the Republicans, and so I’m done with her.

The ratings of the American Conservative Union have their limits, but in this case, they show a definite trend in the voting pattern of Mary Bono Mack versus her late former husband Sonny Bono, and his predecessor Al McCandless:

In this chart I have divided Bono Mack’s time in office at the year redistricting took effect, lest anyone make the excuse that the new CD45 caused her to be different because of changes versus the old CD44, but it’s easy to see what really happened here. Then-Mary Bono started off voting just like Sonny did, but once she became an entrenched incumbent, she decided to veer off from what our district counted on, and now votes her own, different way.

Accordingly, I call upon conservatives in Riverside County, California to try to find someone new to replace Rep. Bono Mack. It’s too late to challenge her this year, of course, but conservatives now have a couple of years to prepare for 2010.

That must be the year California 45 is reclaimed for mainstream Republican values.

Governor Schwarzenegger has announced a new slate of judicial appointees, and he is now completely favoring left-wing Democrats. In the past he was managing to appoint slightly more Republicans than Democrats, as Jon Fleischman points out, but now he has gone completely over the line and favors Democrats over Republicans.

The numbers: in May he appointed 9 Republicans, 8 Democrats, but now he’s appointed 16 Democrats, 12 Republicans, and 2 independents. And given that this is California, being a Democrat is a sign of much more than it may mean in some states. Our Democratic party is far-left, and yet our “Republican” governor is packing the courts with Democrats.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the cost of the “win first, principles second” mentality that drove the support for the Girly Man, and other pro-abort, left-wing ‘moderates’ to begin with. We’ve been told repeatedly by a faction of the party that if only we’d just chuck out inconvenient platform planks on abortion, marriage, and the like, we could win and at least achieve some positive Republican governance. But now Schwarzenegger is living, party-betraying proof that running as Democrat-lite only gets you Democrat-lite governance.

The only way to achieve anything is to stick to your guns, and fight to the last. That is what conservatives in California must do. Without us holding our ground, all will be lost in this state. California needs a sensible Republican party doing what it can in the minority more than it needs a go-along, get-along Republican party with an occasional majority.