Brandon Davies And Bad Rules

It was looking like a great season for the Brigham Young University college basketball team -- ranked 3rd in the country with a 28-2 record. Unfortunately, their leading rebounder, Brandon Davies, got kicked off the team for having consensual premarital sex with his girlfriend. Like drinking alcohol and coffee, premarital sex is forbidden by the University honor code. They promptly lost their next game by 18 points to an unranked team.

It takes effort to instill discipline in people and get them to follow rules. It's a real shame when that effort gets wasted on arbitrary or harmful rules. In an era of condoms and the pill, preventing eager young athletes from having sex with each other falls squarely into the arbitrary and harmful category.

You Can Hurt A Campaign With Gaffes If You're Sarah Palin

I've mostly been converted to the Douglas Hibbs view of what wins elections -- it's all about raising people's real income over the last year and not getting too many of our fighting boys and girls killed in war. How well does this simple two-factor model predict election outcomes? Pretty darn well -- see the graph at right. The two biggest outliers, 1996 and 2000, look less problematic if you recognize the influence of third party candidates. Give Nader's 3 points to Gore in 2000 and of Perot's 8% to Dole in 1996, and things look really tight. So I agree with Yglesias and Bernstein on the general point they're making (gaffes by candidates aren't that big a deal), and on the specific issue of whether Huckabee's 'Obama grew up in Kenya' gaffe will hurt him (it won't). By the way, you can click on any of the graphs in this post to see them in larger form.

Let me speak for the other side a little, though. If your gaffes are so horrendous (and/or your damage control is so crappy, and/or your enemies are so effective) that they can turn you into a complete joke to swing voters, they can hurt you. And this is where Sarah Palin is right that the usual rules of politics don't apply to her -- she's one of the few people disastrous enough to sink a presidential campaign.

At left I've got the graph by Richard Johnston and Emily Thorson showing Sarah Palin's influence on the 2008 election. (Some of you will have seen this a year or two back.) The top chart is the Obama ticket versus the McCain ticket, the middle chart is of people's ratings of the economy, and the bottom chart is of how people rated all 4 candidates with Sarah Palin in bold. The second vertical line that they've drawn through the graphs is a pretty amazing one -- that's where McCain's share of the vote in the polling averages begins to drop about 4%, even as opinions about the economy and McCain himself hang steady. What changes? People achieve their maximum level of horror at Sarah Palin, and she loses nearly 10 favorability points.

So: elections are mostly about the economy, but candidates can hurt themselves with a series of horrible gaffes if they're as ridiculous as Sarah Palin.

Physicist Democrats: Listen To Nick And Run For Office

You guys are awesome and we need more of you.Rush Holt, formerly of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, just beat Watson at Jeopardy.

Also, if you didn't catch it last year when it happened, Energy Secretary and Nobel Prize winner Steven Chu used gamma rays to save the planet. I guess that's a lot more consequential, but the Jeopardy thing is cool too.

Bill O'Reilly And The Palm Trees Of Wisconsin

At about the 14 and 27 second marks of this Bill O'Reilly clip of people acting badly, supposedly at the protests in Wisconsin, you can see some interesting vegetation in the background.
Wisconsin readers can confirm whether palm trees are common in the Madison area. I don't remember any vegetation like that from my visit to Madison five years ago. Maybe climate change is hitting Wisconsin hard! Or maybe Fox News is using videos of somebody else behaving badly to make false accusations against the Wisconsin labor people.

I don't usually post clips of Bill O'Reilly's show being ridiculous, since this blog isn't really about preaching to the choir. But this is short, simple, and perfectly dishonest.

Anecdata on Kids Today

Do the kids today watch movies that aren't current? Here's my data point.

I took a new job in December, and my new team has a 23-year old whippersnapper. He hadn't seen The Matrix, which was for a certain class of nerds The Most Important Movie Of Its Time. It also didn't feel like it came out that long ago, but of course by the time he had graduated college it was ten years old.

To see if this was unusual, I looked up the top grossing films of 1992, as well as the top rated movies on IMDB. There's no direct analogue to The Matrix on either list, but of the action/nerd/scifi-ish movies I had seen Batman Returns, Wayne's World, Dracula, Reservoir Dogs, Sneakers, and Army of Darkness but not Lethal Weapon 3, Unforgiven, Patriot Games, Under Siege, or Alien 3. So, 6 out of 11.

Obviously my anecdote here is by no means authoritative. I assume that with more media sources generally, there's more dispersion of media consumption. But I'd guess that the Kids These Days are still watching "old" movies, just with a wider variety. Surely there's a Masters' thesis lurking in here somewhere.