links for 2008-11-06

"I don't agree that Obama can wait nearly a year before doing something about torture." Neither do I. I'd close it in the first 100 days.

"Although John McCain's loss was not as numerically stunning as the 1964 defeat of Barry Goldwater, who won 16 fewer states and 122 fewer electoral votes than McCain seems to have won as of this writing, Tuesday's trouncing was more dispiriting for conservatives. Goldwater's loss was constructive; it invigorated his party by reorienting it ideologically. McCain's loss was sterile, containing no seeds of intellectual rebirth.

"Goldwater's candidacy closed an argument that had roiled Republicans since 1912, when party liberals deserted President William Howard Taft and supported the third-party candidacy of former President Theodore Roosevelt. Woodrow Wilson won; Taft finished third. Thereafter, liberal and conservative Republicans coexisted uneasily, with conservatives confined to the congressional wing. Three times they failed to nominate for president 'Mr. Republican,' Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, son of the capsized president." I *want* the GOP to be reborn. This country needs it.

"This good. The only state their model got wrong was Indiana, where they expected a narrow Obama loss. He won the state by a hair. Nate Silver owned this election on the polling front: one young guy with a background in baseball stats beat out the mainstream media in a couple of months. And he beat out the old web: I mean if you consider the total joke of Drudge's recent coverage and compare it with Silver's, you realize that the web is a brutal competitive medium where only the best survive – and they are only as good as their last few posts.

"If you want to know why newspapers are dying: that's why. They're just not as good as the web at its best. This election proved that beyond any doubt. For the record, I think the WSJ and the WaPo and the NYT and the Anchorage Daily News rocked in this election. Most of the rest of the old media: not so much." But Nate can't leave us in baseball!

"House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., and Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee's Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, are looking at redirecting those tax breaks to a new system of guaranteed retirement accounts to which all workers would be obliged to contribute." P linked to this (http://crazybutable.com/zateraul/2008/11/06/ok-now-im-starting-to-get-upset/), and … I'm not happy with it, either. If this gets any traction, this Obama voter would be letting Barack know.

Just brutal.

"Obama was something unusual in a politician: genuinely self-aware. In late May 2007, he had stumbled through a couple of early debates and was feeling uncertain about what he called his 'uneven' performance. 'Part of it is psychological,' he told his aides. 'I'm still wrapping my head around doing this in a way that I think the other candidates just aren't. There's a certain ambivalence in my character that I like about myself. It's part of what makes me a good writer, you know? It's not necessarily useful in a presidential campaign.'"

But I *like* talking about politics!

"The emerging conventional wisdom is that there was some sort of a Bradley Effect in this contest — voters told pollsters that they weren't about to vote for that rascal Ted Stevens, when in fact they were perfectly happy to. Convicted felons are the new black, it would seem." That Nate can make a joke about this in this way and that I can laugh at it and not even have the smallest "oooh, that's not good!" bells go off in my head is the true testament to how great it is that Obama's the President-elect.