I went to bed before NJ or NY-23 was called, so while I'm slightly disappointed to see the Republican win in NJ after all (Booker '13?) I'm very glad to see the extremists cost the GOP that century-old House seat in NY-23.

Nate Silver goes race by race at FiveThirtyEight.com. Here's NJ:

Obama approval was actually pretty strong in New Jersey, at 57 percent, but 27 percent of those who approved of Obama nevertheless voted for someone other than Corzine. This one really does appear to be mostly about Corzine being an unappealing candidate, as the Democrats look like they'll lose just one or two seats in the state legislature in Trenton. Corzine compounded his problems by staying negative until the bitter end of the campaign rather than rounding out his portfolio after having closed the margin with Christie.

And here's NY-23:

NY-23: Democrat Bill Owens prevails in a result that will be regarded as surprising; the final tally isn't in yet but it appears as though it will be something on the order of 50-45 over Conservative Doug Hoffman. I don't think I've ever hedged more on predicting the outcome of a race; the main issue is that there was a rather large discrepancy between the polling, which heavily favored Hoffman, and what I perceived to be the facts on the ground. NY-23 is solidly Republican but not especially conservative (it voted for Barack Obama last year), and Hoffman was a relatively uncharismatic candidate with poor command of the local issues.

If New Jersey was a win for the incumbent rule, then NY-23 may have ben a win for the Median voter theorem, as Owens -- a conservative Democrat -- was actually much closer to the average ideology of the district than the capital-C Conservative Hoffman. It was also a reminder that all politics is local (sometimes). More than 95 percent of Hoffman's contributions came from out-of-district, and the conservative activists who tried to brand him as a modern-day Jefferson Smith never bothered to check whether he resonated particularly well with the zeitgeist of the district. In any event, this is a Democratic takeover of a GOP-held seat and they expand by one their majority in the House.

Like Kos, I'd have traded all three races for the Maine marriage-equality vote. That's a heart-breaker, and shows again why it's never a good idea for a society to put minority civil rights on the ballot. Another slight bright side: a civil unions bill passed the ballot in Washington state.

Late Sunday links.

* Rachel Maddow kicks ass on another visit to Meet the Press. They should just give Rachel Meet the Press; I hope eventually they do. It's the only version of the show I could imagine actually watching.

* The networks are apparently afraid of SF; Day One has apparently been downgraded to a miniseries and the V remake is rumored to be forbidden to use the world "alien."

* Octavia Butler's papers will go to the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, joining Christopher Isherwood's, Charles Bukowski's, and Jack London's.

* Playgrounds of the 1970s. A version of the Officer Big Mac at right was active in Ledgewood, NJ, well into the 2000s. (Is it still there?)

* Judith Butler: Save California's universities. My only quibble is that she appears to be writing in the wrong country's newspaper.

* More Nate Silver: That the conservative intelligentsia reacted giddily to news of the Americans losing is telling. It's telling of a movement that was long ago knocked off its intellectual moorings and has lost the capacity to think about what people outside the room think about. Flagged by Bitter Laughter. More thoughts along the same lines from Cogitamus and Contrary Brin.

* My happiest time was after Mao came into power. Our social status improved. People were allowed to express their views. Before, people had no right to speak out. After the founding of new China, the first parade, I was on the front row during the first parade. Foreign journalists from America and the Soviet Union took lots pictures of me. I was carrying a flower basket, walking down Huaihai road, it was very festive, and there was much excitement. I went out during the parade every year for many years, rain or shine. Why the Chinese support the Communist party.

Nate Silver considers Jon Corzine's chances of winning an election where he can't crack 40% in the polls.

Here's what this boils down to: there are probably a finite number of people willing to get out of bed and vote for Jon Corzine on November 3rd. And it's a number, moreover, that wouldn't ordinarily be enough to allow a candidate to carry the state. But the voters who don't want to vote for Corzine have two alternatives, other than voting for Christie: they can vote for Chris Daggett or they can sit the election out. If enough of them choose one of those options, then Corzine can still win a low-turnout election.

As hopes for 2010 Democratic landslide seem to fade, Nate Silver says all is not lost.

Monday procrastination sensations.

* The Burnt-out Adjunct has some advice at Inside Higher Ed about the difference between adjuncts, add-junks, and instructors.

* 3 Quarks Daily has some thoughts from Timothy Fongon on building a viable American left:

Only about 25 percent of US citizens hold a passport. (See 2007 population data here and number of Americans with passports here.) A majority of Americans have never travelled overseas. Thus, any movement which makes appeals primarily on the basis of universalist/internationalist rhetoric is likely to have an audience significantly smaller than the majority of the US population.

The whole essay strongly echoes a proclamation from the C.L.R. James I was reading just last night: "To Bolshevize America it is necessary to Americanize Bolshevism."

* A Feministe guestblogger describes the difficulties in filling out forms when one is transgender. The thread also introduces me to a term I've missed up to now, cisgender, denoting someone whose gender identity is aligned with their biological sex—which means I can now describe the forms Queen Emily discusses as cisnormative (which they are—no need for little boxes with prescribed answers when you could just have a blank line).

* Nate Silver gets a little more pragmatic with a close look at how a climate bill can get 60 votes in the Senate. He's also got a post on Sarah Palin's appeal that, for my money, misses what's so terrifying about Palin: (1) the clear sense that the right is building itself a second George W. Bush out of identitarian resestment, sloganeering, faux folksy charm, and hero worship, and (2) that it already worked once.

* Steve Benen has your bogus Obama scandal roundup.

Walpin was all the rage in conservative circles, right up until the "controversy" appeared baseless, and White House detractors were forced to move on.

But notice how this has happened quite a bit in the very young Obama administration. Remember when conservatives were convinced that the White House was closing car dealerships based on owners' political contributions? Or how about the not-so-scandalous Department of Homeland Security report about potentially violent extremists, which prompted some conservatives to call for Napolitano's resignation? Or about the EPA economist whose bizarre memo on global cooling was "suppressed"?

All of these caused widespread apoplexy among rabid anti-Obama activists. And all of these quickly fell apart after minimal scrutiny.

* Transformers II and racism. More from Ezra Klein.

* And Michael Chabon has a nice essay in The New York Review of Books about the wilderness of childhood set against both adult nostalgia for the freedom of youth and contemporary overparenting and child endangerment hysteria. But the headline ("Manhood for Amateurs") is wrong under the article's own terms:

This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map—marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle—that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.

Sloppy work from the editor there.

Oh, only fifty?

Iran's Guardian Council has admitted that the number of votes collected in 50 cities surpass the number of those eligible to cast ballot in those areas.

The council's Spokesman Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, who was speaking on the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) Channel 2 on Sunday, made the remarks in response to complaints filed by Mohsen Rezaei -- a defeated candidate in the June 12 Presidential election.

"Statistics provided by Mohsen Rezaei in which he claims more than 100% of those eligible have cast their ballot in 170 cities are not accurate -- the incident has happened in only 50 cities," Kadkhodaei said.

The spokesman, however, said that although the vote tally affected by such an irregularity is over 3 million, "it has yet to be determined whether the amount is decisive in the election results," reported Khabaronline.

Analysis and mockery at FiveThirtyEight.com, where Nate writes:

This leaves only two possibilities: that there was widespread ballot-stuffing or that the results in some or all areas don't reflect any physical count of the ballots but were fabricated whole hog on a spreadsheet.

Two posters at FiveThirtyEight.com throw cold water on the theory that Benford's Law proves the Iranian elections were rigged.

Iran politics, American politics.

* NYU's Joshua Tucker: 'Don’t Expect This Week’s Protests To Lead To Revolution In Iran.'

* Suspect positionalities watch: Marc Ambinder says we should "follow the developments in Iran like a CIA analyst." I'm not sure that's quite the posture I'd recommending adopting—especially as it takes a stunningly doe-eyed view of the CIA—but the hermeneutic of general skepticism Ambinder advocates seems wise.

* Nate Silver analyzes that pre-election poll that's getting increasing attention today.

If you take that 30 percent swing vote and add it to Ahmadinejad's 33 percent base, he could have won the election with 63 percent of the vote, as he ostensibly did on Friday. If you take it and add it to Mousavi's column, Ahmadinejad would have gone down to a solid defeat.

The point that few commentators are realizing—Al Giordano is an exception—is that this story really isn't about the way that the votes were counted. It's about whether Iran is capable at this point of having an election in which the democratic will of its electorate is properly reflected. If Ahmadinejad hired a bunch of thugs to hold every Iranian at gunpoint while they were casting their ballots, it would not have been difficult for him to get 63 percent of the vote—indeed, he'd probably have wound up with very close to 100 percent. This would be an election—and there would be no need at all to tamper with the results. But it wouldn't be an expression of democracy. We need to separate out those two concepts. Ahmadinejad, as far as we know, did not go so far as to hold anyone at gunpoint. But the tentacles of fear in Iran run deep.

* Still more from Iran: details on the protester shot in Azadi Square today and big pictures from the Big Picture.

* Obama, political capital, and climate change: Matt Yglesias makes a good point.

The American presidency is a weird institution. If Barack Obama wants to start a war with North Korea and jeopardize the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, it’s not clear that anyone could stop him. If he wants to let cold-blooded murderers out of prison, it’s completely clear that nobody can stop him. But if he wants to implement the agenda he was elected on just a few months ago, he needs to obtain a supermajority in the United States Senate.

* And your attention please: Sonia Sotomayor is no longer a racist.

Kinohi asks in the comments:

Interesting numbers, but is there anything out there that gives us some sense of *how* the election was stolen so dramatically? Were there election observers in Iran? Who was in charge of local elections? Until we get a better account of how this was done, these numbers will be meaningless.

I'm not prepared to answer that question except to say that the prevailing theory seems to be that votes were not legitimately counted at all—Ahmadinejad was simply declared the overwhelming winner by official state agencies after an extralegally brief period of time.

But there is more information coming out about the numbers that provides more context. Two posts from Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com look at the numbers in more depth: first, what are apparently the official numbers from the Iranian government, including breakdown by province, and second a post from Nate's coblogger Renard Sexton charting statistical irregularities in this election against recent Iranian electoral history.

Matt Yglesias takes up the point Vu has been making in the comments, that late polls showed Ahmadinejad winning, and adds this important caveat:

That said, Juan Cole raises a hugely important point of interpretation. Ballen and Doherty talk about how their mid-May poll showed Ahmadenijad with a 2-1 lead, about what the official results show. But they don’t mention the specific numbers. According to Professor Cole, “It found that the level of support for the incumbent was 34%, with Mousavi at 14%.” That seems like a 34-14 is very different from an official result in which Ahmadenijad’s support was in the sixties. In the domestic American context if you had an incumbent polling at 34 percent, you’d say he was in huge trouble no matter how badly his opponent was doing.

Ayatollah Khamenei has apparently pulled back from his proclamation of a "divine assessment"; he has now ordered an investigation into the results.

(Picture via the WSJ slide show. The image is of a pro-Ahmadinejad rally; I picked it because it is striking and because it reflects the extent to which both sides are rapidly becoming radicalized.)

Following up on Vu's link in the comments to a pre-election poll showing a sizable Ahmadinejad lead, here's Nate Silver arguing that the much-trumpeted linear graph doesn't by itself prove election fraud. But as Nate's commenters point out, alphabetizing final state-by-state results flattens out exactly the sorts of discontinuities (regional and otherwise) we would expect to see in partial, real-time election results—rendering Nate's demonstration somewhat unpersuasive. There's also this news, via Andrew Sullivan: the president of Iran's electoral monitoring commission has declared the results invalid, and Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani has resigned his position on the Expediency Council.

It's a long way to 2012, but Nate Silver is doing some early number-crunching:

Where would Barack Obama be re-elected if an election were held today?

We can't know for sure, and it would depend on many contingencies, such as the identity of his Republican opponent. One quick-and-dirty way to assess this question, however, is to look at those states where Obama's approval rating is 50 percent or higher. Based on a compilation of public polls since February 15th, that appears to be the case in the following states:



Full analysis at the link.

Thursday night links.

* Is the rumored Buffy reboot just a ploy to get Sarah Michelle Gellar on board?

* This brief history of Star Trek reboots makes a persuasive case for the centrality of the "reboot" in the logic of SF franchise.

* Manga collector faces 15 years for comics collection. More at MeFi.

* Hulu has a desktop client.

* Alan Moore's "Future Shocks" goes digital. These are all good, get to iTunes immediately.

* Today's bizarre outrage of the day is a Fox-News-backed conspiracy theory that Obama is selectively closing Republican-owned Chrysler dealerships. Nate Silver and Kevin Drum debunk.

* Also at FiveThirtyEight: Operation Gringo: Can the Republicans Sacrifice the Hispanic Vote and Win the White House?

Super Happy Insomnia Linkdump.

* Here come your Simpsons stamps.

* Thomas Lennon says The State DVD is finally coming out this July. Meanwhile, State alums Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter have a new show and a new blog.

* Only 53% of Americans think capitalism is better than socialism. What happens when we cross 50%? Does it mean over-educated literary theory PhDs suddenly get to be in charge? I certainly hope it means that.

* The dark side of Dubai. Ugly, ugly stuff.

* On the neuropsychology of zombies. Via Pharyngula.

* A good post I forgot to link to a few days ago from FiveThirtyEight.com: Nate Silver predicts when various states will legalize gay marriage. My expectation is that a federal court ruling will make gay marriage a nationwide reality via the full faith and credit clause long before Mississippi—a state sweltering with the heat of injustice—gets its chance in 2024.

* And Part 4 of Matt Zoller Seitz's Wes Anderson documentary is up. This part's on J.D. Salinger.

A few more missing links from the last few days.

* What sort of game are Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld playing? First the pilot for Curb Your Enthusiasm is a preemptive parody of Comedian, several years before the fact—now Jerry Seinfeld has signed with NBC to do a reality TV show that sounds like nothing so much as Curb Your Enthusiasm.

* Supermen of Pre-Golden-Age SF.

* How they made The Godfather.

* Is Switzerland the next Iceland?

* The Milky Way Transit Authority.

* Simulation of a black hole destroying a star.

* And is the FiveThirtyEight.com brand ruined?

Seriously, I have pink eye. That's just absurd. Here are some links.

* Utopia is now: curing cancer by virus.

* Dystopia is now: New York is talking about taxing Internet porn. What's 4% of free?

* How the Crash will reshape America.

* Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. Via American Stranger.

* Salute to British comic creators.

* Is Final Crisis "the death knell of the 'mad ideas' school of comics writing"?

* Nate Silver tries to statisticize the Oscars.

* Goodbye, Dubai.

* And Candleblog directs us to the official Trilogy Meter. Pretty good, but they got Back to the Future 2 wrong; it's not only better than the original, it's the greatest cinematic achievement of all time.

Potpourri and remainders.

* Is Dollhouse doomed? 7 Trouble Signs. Yes, it is doomed, and not just because of the Friday Night Death Slot—it's a comparatively weak premise that's already been messed with by the network and which requires Eliza Dushku to be a much better actress than she is. Despite attempts to put a brave face on, it's evident that Joss has a disaster on his hands:

2. Work stoppage. Production was actually halted. Twice. Once for script issues on the fourth episode, and once for the sixth and seventh. Whedon said in a blog, "To get a sense of how completely turned around I was during this process, you should know there was a scene with Eliza and the astonishing Ashley Johnson that I wrote and shot completely differently three different times, with different characters in different places (actually I wrote it closer to eight times), and none of it will ever see air." Really? The creator of the show had to reshoot something three times, and it still didn't work?

Don't get too attached to Dollhouse. Bring on Dr. Horrible: The Series.

* Nate Silver previews the 2010 Senate race and concludes "Even if momentum has swung somewhat against the Democrats by 2010, they remain in a strong position to gain seats in the Senate."

* Unexpectedly, applications to grad school are down, despite the economic downturn.

On Friday, David G. Payne, associate vice president of ETS for college and graduate programs, said that the “current hypothesis” is that the credit crunch is discouraging some people from considering graduate school, especially if they think they will not receive substantial financial support from the programs they might consider.

It also seems likely that more and more students are seeing themselves as simply maxed out when it comes to student debt, regardless of the larger credit crunch.

* Ten ways Canada is not more progressive than the U.S. #2 seems particularly important at the moment.

2. The Monarchy: Related to #1, the head of state in Canada is still technically the Queen of England. While this is generally just a curiousity for Americans to good naturedly rib Canadians about, this past week it made a huge difference. The Queen’s representative, the Governor General of Canada, made the decision that allowed Prime Minister Harper to hang on to power when the left (and nearly two-thirds of Canadian voters picked someone to the left of Harper in the October 2008 election) finally found a way to get together and form a coalition.

* And, via MeFi, the 40 greatest lost icons In pop culture history. Does Letterman still use "Buttafouco" as an all-purpose punch line?

Nate Silver sums up the consensus at the Dole Institute's post-election symposium.

3. The Republican bench is relatively inadequate at the present time in terms of candidates for national office.
3a. On the other hand, the 2012 Presidential cycle is already being looked at as something of a lost cause. Some of the stronger candidates -- both known and unknown -- might want to wait until 2016 to run.
3b. In the long-term, the future of the party probably lies in governor's offices. If the Republicans are smart, this may be their major focus in 2010-12, as opposed to the Congress and even perhaps the Presidency.

4. Sarah Palin is, for the time being, the public face of the Republican Party.
4a. This is not necessarily a good thing for the Republican Party.

Potpourri!

* MetaFilter has a post on gay-rights activist Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to hold elective office in the U.S. and subject of a new Sean Penn biopic, assassinated twenty-seven years ago this week.

* Also via MeFi: the Star-Tribune has an online database of 600 challenged ballots in the Franken-Coleman race. The vote totals on the main page don't look especially good for Franken's chances, nor does the early word from elections guru Nate Silver:

The vast majority of challenges on both sides are frivolous, often utterly so. Perhaps 1 in 10 challenges -- maybe slightly more than that -- actually required a judgment call of some kind.

For what it's worth, Silver's projections now slightly favor Coleman, though "projecting" anything at all strikes me as a significant overreach on Silver's part on garbage-in-garbage-out grounds. Until we know something real about the character of challenged ballots vis-a-vis nonchallenged ballots, there's just no way of projecting what the final vote total will look like.

* In twelve-country poll, 43% see climate crisis as bigger problem than economy. Technological civilization is the chain-smoker who has also broken his leg: they're both big problems, one's just slightly more immediate at the moment.

* Bush is still president, but local leaders are getting the message: the mayor of Los Angeles has proposed a major solar initiative. Good on Villaraigosa, but the depth of our civilization's chain-smoking becomes evident when you read the fine print:

This massive solar proposal is nested in a larger commitment to reduce Los Angeles’ greenhouse gas emissions by 35% below 1990 levels by 2030.

35% below 1990 is a fairly decent number for a single initiative, but 2030's a long way off—the bad stuff is already starting to happen right now.

* The Dr. Horrible DVD is available for pre-order and coming out before Christmas. I'd also be remiss if I didn't link to Buffy! Movie! News!, but come one, there's absolutely no way.

Monday, Monday.

* The Criterion Collection Bottle Rocket is out tomorrow. Here's the Amazon link.

* Nate Silver projects Al Franken will win by 27 votes.

* The World's Best Colleges and Universities. Duke clocks in at #13, but more important, longtime domestic loser Case Western (#90) beats Tufts (#156) in the far more important world rankings, finally giving Neil the humiliation he deserves.

* Amanda Marcotte had the bright idea of reading Mad Men alongside some of the literary texts it makes allusions to, most notably the Frank O'Hara poem that bookends the season, "Meditations in an Emergency."

* Longtime reader Eli Glasner has a great new film blog.

* 10 Stories Behind Dr. Seuss stories. Thanks, Lindsay!

* "Who Stole My Volcano? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dematerialisation of Supervillain Architecture." Via Neilalien.

* A school in New York has already been renamed for Barack Obama. Students initiated the renaming.

* The things you learn from Poli-Sci-Fi Radio: Val Kilmer is mulling a run for governor of New Mexico. Kilmer's only the second-worst Batman, but the one I think I'd want least in elected office.

* Top 25 Comic Book Battles. #1: Batman vs. Superman from The Dark Knight Returns.

* Heroes creator Tim Kring has apologized for calling his fans dipshits. Remember, a gaffe is when you accidentally tell the truth...

Mark Schmitt of TAPPED grades election predictions for the 2008 cycle, with highest marks going to Nate Silver (who else?) and John Judis and Ruy Teixeira of "Emerging Democratic Majority" fame:

After the 2000 election, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira published a book arguing that Democrats would build a majority based on nonwhite and Hispanic voters, shifts in the suburbs, and strength among professionals concentrated in "ideopolises" like the Research Triangle in North Carolina. They were quiet this year (although Ruy produced a superb series of demographic analyses of the country and various states), but their predictions were close to an exact map of the Obama demographic. So why not a solid A? There has to be a little penalty for being ahead of the curve.