Some of Nothing

Other People's Genius
Friday, May 9, 2008

* The L-curve displays income distribution in a way that makes it clearer to non-economist me:

The U.S. Income distribution is not a “Bell Curve”…it is an “L-Curve”! On the scale of the football field graph shown here the bottom 99% of the population measure their incomes in inches. The top 1% measure their incomes as stacks of $100 bills feet or even miles high! The total wealth of the few people in the vertical spike equals the total wealth of the rest of the population combined.

The L-curve graphic is a must-see!


* Dday at Hullabaloo makes some good points about Obama's Vote for Change plan:

On Saturday, in over 100 locations across the country, the Obama Vote for Change campaign will roll out with kickoff events all over the country designed to register and mobilize voters. At the event I'll be attending in South Los Angeles, the goal is to register 2,000 new voters in one afternoon. Multiply that out and you have 200,000 voters registered by one campaign in a single day. And that's only the beginning.

[...]

There are a lot of positives to this. The old leadership of the Party has become ossified, and Obama's takeover is an extension of the Dean movement, only on less explicitly ideological terms. To strip a Lanny Davis and a Terry McAuliffe of their power is frankly a welcome development. The figures in an Obama Administration will likely be core figures within the party for the next 20 years. The next generation will be characterized, as Chris Bowers perceives, with a set of more technocratic, good-government advocates, policy types who have a command of their specific bailiwicks, rather than the corporate-friendly DLC types of recent yore. Neither of these are necessarily progressive, but I'd consider the former group, motivated by policy over politics, far more palatable. And in addition, investing in voter registration and mobilization is the wisest use of resources that I've seen in the Democratic Party in my lifetime.

I've stated in the past how getting people involved and voting is one of my pet issues, so this initiative on the part of Obama's campaign is an early War on Xmas gift for me.


* Matthew Yglesias makes sense when he rags on Ed Kilgore's praise of Hillary's national security credentials:

Clinton's "street cred" on national security consists, of course, of being massively wrong on the most important national security issue of her career. Paradoxically, a lot of folks find her massive wrongness on this hugely important issue reassuring because they and their friends were also wrong and they view having made the right call to be a suspicious quality. After all, the Iraq War may have led to thousands of U.S. deaths, tens of thousands of U.S. casualties, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and millions of Iraqi refugees all at a cost of over $1 trillion and in ways that's damaged the strategic position of the United States, but war opponents were all a bunch of hippies.

My faint-hearted ambivalence toward Hillary turned into pure loathing when she demeaned Obama's war opposition as "a speech he gave in 2002." This attitude toward anti-war positions has had disastrous consequences for all of us. We simply need to expunge it.


Happy other people's genius Friday!

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Nothing New byslag at 2:42 PM