For those of you keeping track, we’re not really bailing out US homeowners; we’re bailing out the bondholders of Freddy mac and Fannie Mae. The predominant bondholder? The central banks of Asian nations. How are we financing this bailout? Using US Government Treasury bonds. Who is buying those? The central banks of Asian nations. For now, at least.

If confidence in US Treasury Bonds falters, we’re all doomed. This is not an exaggeration.

The next president, who in turn will set the regulatory environment, really matters. The best, perhaps the only way, to restore investor confidence in US and global financial institutions is through tight regulation. To be blunt: investors are correct. The Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac bonds were far crappier than they were told. Until everyone in convinced things are worth their claimed worth, things are only going to get worse. We need a president who can take on the financial industries, who is above corruption on this issue above all others.

What follows is a cartoon depicting his involvement in the Keating Five scandal–the last big collapse of US financial institutions, that cost taxpayers over $200 billion (in today’s dollars.)

FiveThirtyEight makes an excellent point:

In a perfect world, we would all like a President who is Ready on Day One (TM); it is not uncommon for a newly-elected president to face a major crisis almost immediately upon taking office. But more commonly, a President takes the Oath of Office under relatively calm waters, allowing them something of a learning curve.

On the other hand, when a Vice President takes over for a president, the nation is necessarily undergoing a crisis, because the death (or resignation) of a president is perhaps as traumatic an event as can reasonably be imagined (in the “best” case resulting from a slowly-developing illness, and the worst, an attack by terrorists or foreign adversaries).

In that light, the GOP’s recent political theater bullshit isn’t just silly. It’s dangerous. I’m totally and completely fed up with Sarah Palin and her personal, professional and political problems. Enough of the notion that deciding to carry a child with trisomy-21 to term makes one capable of leading the nation in a crisis. Enough.

Every single one of these family planning problems have long been solved. I’m willing to bet that Sarah Palin couldn’t make a coherent ethical argument against medically accurate sexual education and contraception, even if you gave her unlimited access to a Jesuit priest and every peer-reviewed medical article ever written. It’s bullshit–pure, unmitigated, willful ignorance parading as a sound ethical position.

I can tell you any couple should have access to the dozens of safe and effective forms of birth control. I can even tell you the precise failure rates of the different methods.

Back when I was in high school–going to school with assholes like this guy–and before the world wide web was really active, I was the source of medically accurate information for a terrifying number of my classmates. Everyone knew my mother was a public health nurse; there was nowhere else to go.

No child in the United States should be so ignorant that they wait until three periods have been missed, all the way to the twilight of the first trimester, before wondering what their choices are. No one should be confused about when and how a couple can get pregnant. No couple should be denied access to–or information about–contraception.

These problems are solved. Long ago solved. Solved in a way that so many of the other problems facing our nation are not solved, are being left now ignored as we debate something that is, in any reasonable sense, undebatable.

Enough of Sarah Palin and the idiotic family planning policies she represents. Enough.

We no longer have the luxury of this debate–with our economy, environment and petroleum-fueled lifestyle all teetering. Her case for herself is centered around her family planning choices. We need our next Vice President–who will only become president during of crescendoing crisis–to be better, more thoughtful and more focused on the actual problems we face.

I’m watching this again, just to bring my brain back up to the serious state needed to start addressing our nation’s and world’s real problems:

Well, did it?

From FiveThirtyEight:

For the first time since shortly after clinching the Democratic nomination, we now have Barack Obama as less than a 60 percent favorite to win the election. Our simulations presently project Obama to win the election 58.4 percent of the time, with McCain winning the remaining 41.6 percent.

If I am to think well of Americans, and by extension well of our future, I would believe this is because we’re finally ready to hear the dark, ugly truth that we already know. Things are bad. They’re likely to get worse. We have a narrow, and narrowing, path by which we can make the situation better. I want to believe the electorate finally wants a leader who is willing to publicly acknowledge reality–that our economy, our health, our intelligence, our status in the world and our lives are not even close to the ideal, that the whole of our global civilization is teetering on a crumbling foundation.

In my dreams, that were once my hopes for Obama, he’d be giving speeches with clear, bold statements like:
“As we fret about increases in energy and food prices, we must remember that what is a price increase for us, represents starvation for other people around the world. People with empty stomachs, uncertain of their next meal, are prone to terrifying acts. It’s long been said that democracies do not have famines. This statement cuts both ways. Those pained with hunger and want are incapable of participating in the, once growing, community of self-governance. We wonder why some in the world are furious with us. Want.”

“Our entire fossil-fueled civilization is unsustainable, in the literal sense of the world. Unsustainable is not synonymous with undesirable or far from the ideal. It means, if we do not change our ways, this all will come to an end, sooner rather than later.”

“We must stop looking for someone else to solve our problems. None of the challenges we face are insurmountable. But all will cost us in the short-term. We will either be willing to sacrifice some now, so that we can exist as a society in the future, or greedily slide into ever-increasing decline and despair.”

I want to believe this, that Obama could do this and not become Walter Mondale. McCain isn’t exactly Mr. Morning in America. Both McCain and Obama seem weary of claiming things are wonderful, and getting ever more wonderful with every passing moment. McCain, while tangentially acknowledging the ugly truth, offers more of the same–Low-tax conservatism, doubling down.

Obama could finally be the other, the Mondale, McGovern or Robert Kennedy who survives and wins. And if he couldn’t, don’t we deserve the fate that awaits us?

1. Remember that polls are always of a population that may or may not resemble who actually goes to the polls. Only pay attention to polls that randomly select respondents. Consider how the poll selects the respondents.

For example, almost all polls used in the presidential race are based off random telephone surveys of landline telephones. I only have a cell phone. Therefore, I am not sampled in the statistical population surveyed.

Thus, even if the poll is perfect, it might not reflect the reality at the polls in the fall, as the populations might not match.

2. A poll only shows a statistically meaningful difference between two candidates if the difference between them is more than twice the margin of error. Most political polls in the United States are designed to have a margin of error of +/- 3%. Therefore, the difference between the candidates must be greater than 6% to be anything other than a tie.

A margin of error of 3% tells us that the true percentage in the population has a 95% chance of being somewhere between three percent above or below the number reported by the survey.

For example, the Rasmussen June 9 2008 poll of Michigan voters has Obama at 45%, McCain at 42%. Statistically, they are tied, as the actual percentage of the population for Obama ranges from 42% to 48%, McCain 39% to 45%. The ranges overlap, and therefore we cannot say that one is leading over the other.

Another fun thing to consider. 95% confidence means that for one in twenty polls, the true population percentage will not be in this range.

The practical meaning of all this? Beware selectively looking at the poll results! If you are selective enough, you can only see the error you want to see. Net result? Suicidal thoughts in November.

3. Often the real trends are smaller than the error ranges of the surveys. We can employ two math tricks to make things better.

First, we can aggregate many surveys together and get an average of percentages. Provided the surveys are independent of one another–that the results of one survey don’t affect another–this makes the error distribution closer to normal by the central limit theorem.

The second trick is to use moving averages as a mathematically safe way to sort out random ups-and-downs in the poll numbers from the real longer term changes in the sampled population.

Think of how much your weight changes each day, by when you’ve last gone to the bathroom, how much water you’ve drank and so on. The change on a day-by-day basis is far larger than what you’ll typically gain or lose in a week. So, if you measure your weight each day, and then average together the last seven days, you end up smoothing out all the variance. Left behind is the actual change on a week-long basis. We can use the same math on the polls.

Quite a few websites are around that basically do all of this for us, limiting themselves to polls with some statistical rigor, base their analysis on the confidence intervals, and aggregate multiple polls together in a moving average. None are perfect, but I’ve taken a shine to electoral-vote.com for it’s non-commercial goodness and openness. I think the site is too aggressive in calling states–Michigan is listed as barely Obama, I think it should be a toss-up–but overall it’s a decent place to start.

Intrade, an online futures trading website, allows you to make investments based on whether or not you believe a given event is likely to happen. Will the average price of gasoline be over $4.00 on June 30th? Will Israel and/or the US bomb Iran by the 30th of September? Will McCain or Obama win any given state in the 2008 election?

If you choose properly, the investment pays $100. Choose wrong, and you get nothing. You can buy a contract (or sell an existing contract) at some price between $0 and $100. The more people certain that a given even will occur, the closer this price will be to $100. The less certain, the closer to $0. So, you can think of the price of the contract as the rough likelihood of an event occurring in all the investors minds–a sort of opinion poll.

Because, presumably, each investor is integrating a lot of information when deciding to buy a contract or not, we can think of this price as a sort of average of independent averages. If we convince ourselves of this, we can apply the central limit theorem and assume all sorts of nice things about the error of this contract price. Even if the individual investors are each biased, the overall error price should be normally distributed, if the central limit theorem holds. In English? There are reasons to believe that the contract price is a pretty decent reflection of (future) reality.

What electoralmap.net is doing is looking at the contract prices for each State’s race between Obama and McCain in November, calling the states based on the current contract prices and adding up the electoral votes. If you do it right now, Obama wins.