Monday, October 22, 2012

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Derek Jacobi, 74. Really, imdb? Best known for Gladiator, The King's Speech, Henry V, and Underworld: Evolution? Granted, he is astonishingly good in Henry V, but then again everyone is.

No, I haven't figured out what I'm going to do about the debate/ballgame conflict tonight. But I do have plenty of good stuff in the meantime:


1. Matt Dickinson on debates, mattering, the state of the presidential race, that sort of thing.

2. John Sides tries once more to knock down the idea that gerrymandering creates partisanship.

3. While Joshua Huder argues that polarization as observed in Congressional voting is to a surprisingly large extent an artifact of chamber rules and procedures.


4. Paul Krugman points out that most people don't actually care about the federal budget deficit. Caveat: remember, Candy Crowley selected the debate questions from those submitted by the undecided voters; it's possible that some of them did ask about the deficit, but that she didn't pick those.

5. Good Nate Cohen post on the polling in Ohio.

6. Jay Ulfelder on scoring forecasts. Several good points there.

7. Brad DeLong (and Krugman) beat up on Rob Portman about China and macroeconomics.

8. And an excellent post by Sarah Binder about Congressional procedure and the fiscal cliff. Several good points, but I'll underline the one I've been making: the main problem in getting an agreement passed is divided government, not the filibuster.

8 comments:

  1. When the Tigers were playing during the last debate, I watched the debate on my laptop, with sound, and the game on the tv, without sound.

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  2. I figure Jon and Dave will do the first three innings of the game and then switch over to the debate, and then Kruk and Kuip will take the middle innings.

    If the debate isn't close during the last half-hour, Jon will start telling stories about McGovern and trying to imitate Joe Biden.

    Thanks,
    -E.

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  3. Game is looking to have a good chance of being rained out (pouring here in Oakland this morning...). Debate is rain or shine, so maybe there's no conflict...

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  4. A Derek Jacobi "best known for" list with no mention of I, Claudius? Do you have something against videotape?

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  5. If you still take your MLB with a scoop of mystique and aura, tonight's game is pretty intriguing: The Team That Wouldn't Die v. The Team They Couldn't Kill in a one-game, winner-take-all showdown.

    Assuming the weather cooperates, I expect the thing to be decided sometime early tomorrow morning, by a non-Cardinal or Giant, perhaps Bud Selig or someone like that.

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  6. Best known for I, Claudius, surely? How you neglected this for a third-rate part in the third-rate Gladiator.. well, heaven knows!

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  7. The fate of our Republic is small potatoes when compared to the fate of our baseball team. There will be a new President in either 3 months, or 4 years and 3 months. The Giants might not have another opportunity to be in the World Series again in my lifetime.

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  8. I don't know if I'm being overly defensive here, but gottacook and NickT -- you realize that the "best known" I'm referring to is what imdb has, right? And yes, it's obviously goofy. I assume that their best known is automated...no idea how the program works, but it obviously is way off base on this one.

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