I probably spent the best part of the nationalized health care debate listening to this idea that 'Canada does it, therefore it works'. A lot of conservatives challenged it from the idea that, 'nuh uh, it doesn't work'. Even dating back to the mid to late Bush administration, we were being treated to random guy who knows a Canadian who moved here because the waiting list for 4 stitches was 11 months. Likewise, hard left types love to bring up random canuck who they know who randomly caught Eb...

Something else I came across in my efforts to figure out the anti-unemployment angle. Pretty brutal : First taking a big bite out of Barry O: The good news is we have avoided another Great Depression. But it seems ill-advised for Barack Obama to stand up on a Friday morning in early July and say that the economy is "headed in the right direction" (even if, as he said, "we are not headed there fast enough") and to highlight "the sixth straight month of job ...

I've written about the tendency of the derailed right to bash unemployed folks here and here . Truthfully, I still find the idea totally inexplicable. Politically it just doesn't seem right. For giggles I put this together: Top X states for unemployment, red/blue coding of the rate based on '08's presidential election results. Obviously, this is a 'broad' look and it's not geared for detail digging, but rather was something I kicked together to see if there was a meaningful pattern...

Huffpo's front page right now has a gigantic picture of Steele with a link that says "War Within the GOP". Link goes to this : Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) the beloved libertarian, former presidential candidate and longtime skeptic of foreign military entanglements, put out a statement on Sunday congratulating Steele for having the courage to, as he put it, tell the truth on the Afghan war: I would like to congratulate Michael Steele for his leadership on one of the most...

This is going to be fun : The National Rifle Association is in unfamiliar terrain on the conservative firing range this election year: It’s the target. The conservative Netroots are abuzz over the possibility that the NRA may endorse Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). This would be the second major slight by the NRA for political conservatives — the gun group also just negotiated a big exemption on a campaign finance bill loathed by the right. Conservatives say there’s a ...

From a current project: Let's just say you have about 100 rows of this: And you want to show it in a way that doesn't give people a total headache. This kind of works. There's a few things worth mentioning here: 1. The sparkline is showing grey for 08, white for 09, and grey for the available 2010 data. It looks a little off balance because I don't have a crystal ball to tell you what the rest of the 2010 data will be:) 2. The red and blue marks indicate lows and highs r...

Originally discussed here . My oh my, what a black eye. For starters: -There's a rumor floating around that only 500 were sold . As much as I would have laughs at a phone with that kind of marketing only selling 500 units, that seems a bit low. Maybe in one market they only sold 500, maybe they only sold 500 in the first week, but more jitterbugs have been sold than that. Just in 'walk in, my contract is up, I need a new phone' traffic, Verizon should have been able to sell more than 5...

Via Salon : The latest Steele gaffe, you might have heard by now, involves the war in Afghanistan. In an amateur video posted on YouTube, the RNC chairman calls it "a war of Obama's choosing" and "not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in." (Apparently, Steele wasn't paying attention to the news back in, say, October 2001.) He also says that history has shown that "the one thing you don't do is engage in a land war in Afghanistan...

When last I posted of Microsoft , I mentioned a bit about what I thought was their greatest accomplishment: I think that MS's greatest accomplishment in the last decade or so has been the Xbox. They plunged headfirst into one of the most difficult tech markets and not only survived but thrived. Ironically, it had little to do with 'synergy' or marketing gimmicks or because people had a predisposition to buy the Xbox because of the Microsoft name, but because they put out a high quality, kic...

Oh dear. Breitbart: I’ve had $100,000 burning in my pocket for the last three months and I’d really like to spend it on a worthy cause. So how about this: in the interests of journalistic transparency, and to offer the American public a unique insight in the workings of the Democrat-Media Complex, I’m offering $100,000 for the full “JournoList” archive, source fully protected. Now there’s an offer somebody can’t refuse. The American people, at least half of whom are the obj...

An American soldier blows up a HP printer . I guess that's one way to fix it.

I know I do . A bit over two weeks ago, a group of statistic wizards (Mark Grebner, Michael Weissman, and Jonathan Weissman) approached me with a disturbing premise -- they had been poring over the crosstabs of the weekly Research 2000 polling we had been running, and were concerned that the numbers weren't legit. I immediately began cooperating with their investigation, which concluded late last week. Daily Kos furnished the researchers with all available and relevant informat...

NYT : About 10,000 Americans died by handgun violence, according to federal statistics, in the four months that the Supreme Court debated which clause of the Constitution it would use to subvert Chicago’s entirely sensible ban on handgun ownership. The arguments that led to Monday’s decision undermining Chicago’s law were infuriatingly abstract, but the results will be all too real and bloody. This began two years ago, when the Supreme Court disregarded the plain words of the ...

The official MS blog spins some numbers : Some are really interesting and tell you something about what MS's numbers are like: <10 Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2008. [source] 96 Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2009. [source] ------ 24% Linux Server market share in 2005. [source] 33% Predicted Linux Server market share for 2007 (made in 2005). [source] 21.2% Actual Linux Server market share, Q4 2009. [sou...

LGF : Tea Party wacko Rick Barber, who’s running for Congress in the GOP primary in Alabama’s 2nd District, was last seen at LGF when he posted a video calling for President Obama to be impeached and openly inciting anti-government insurrection. Well, he’s lovingly fondling his Revolutionary War pistol again, ranting about a “tyrannical health care bill,” having psychotic conversations about slavery with an actor playing Abraham Lincoln, and comparing taxe...