Causality much?

Brian Stelter at the NY Times gets spun:

Fully half of the United States is now watching television in high definition, the fastest adoption of TV technology since the VCR hit store shelves in the 1980s.

With the adoption comes good news for networks and Hollywood studios: HD lures viewers to TV for longer periods of time. According to The Nielsen Company, high-definition households watch about 3 percent more prime-time programming than their standard-definition counterparts. [Emphasis added.]

Yeah.  The other possibility is that people who watch TV more are more likely to buy HD.

Non-scandal ensnares Romanoff in its non-clutches

In Sunday's Denver Post, Mike Littwin tries to tie Andrew Romanoff to Sestak-gate, or whatever the hell we're calling it.  The link is that Romanoff was allegedly offered a position in the Obama administration to keep him from running against Michael Bennet.  But Romanoff doesn't want to talk about it.  As Littwin says,

But Romanoff won't answer the question. And it's worse than that. According to Romanoff spokesman Roy Teicher, not only does Romanoff refuse to answer the question, he won't even say why he refuses to answer the question.

I suppose this is what happens when you run for office pledging transparency.  Basically, every reporter and critic out there suddenly thinks they're entitled to know everything about you, and if you decline, it's a) a cover-up; and b) a broken campaign promise.  Yes, I know, they say it's always the cover-up, not the crime, but if there's no actual crime, every denial of wrongdoing can be perceived as a cover-up.  Remember Whitewater?

So Littwin wants to know why Romanoff isn't saying anything about being offered a job.  Well, I'm just going to guess it has something to do with the fact that Romanoff a) went to law school; and b) remembers the Clinton impeachment.  The Republicans seem to think they've found a nut.  Should they end up in the majority, they'll definitely pursue impeachment.  Count on it.  And if that happens, Romanoff will be one of the first people subpoenaed.  And, of course, if you're forced to testify before a special prosecutor, the less you say, and the less you've said publicly before that, the better.

Update: So much for that theory.

Obictus

I finally saw "Invictus."  I thought it was quite good, although I'm really no closer to understanding rugby.

I can't be the first person to comment on this, but wasn't this film basically about Obama?  I mean, here's the first black president elected to lead a divided nation with a shameful history of white-on-black racial oppression.  Whites are expecting the worst, and blacks are itching for payback.  But the new president decides that it's more important to heal his nation than deliver to the people who put him in office, so he spends a lot of time trying to get blacks to swallow their desires and tolerate the whites who were oppressing them just a few years earlier.  It almost seems like director Clint Eastwood's fantasy for what Obama should have been doing after his inauguration.

New layout

Trying a new design, with thanks to Vivian for the tip.  Feedback welcome.

California is everywhere and everywhere is California

Via Sullivan and Edge of the American West, here's a wonderful 1927 map of California produced by Paramount Studios, suggesting filming locations throughout the state that looked convincingly enough like other parts of the world.

I'm sorry to see that, at least as of 1927, the studios weren't yet pushing the versatile Topanga Canyon Malibu Creek State Park as a shooting location.  It would later serve as Korea in "M*A*S*H," both Africa and Virginia in "Roots," and (spoiler alert) future Earth in "Planet of the Apes."  Topanga Canyon Malibu Creek State Park is the Meryl Streep of filming locations.

Colorado Cosa Nostra

Faithful readers may recall my discussion of Colorado's so-called "Gang of Four," a collection of very wealthy liberal activists who have been working to get Democrats elected to the statehouse since 2004.  (See also my review of Schrager and Witwer's wonderful new book on the topic.)  Well, I finally put together a paper analyzing what's going on and will be presenting it at next week's State Politics and Policy Conference in Springfield, Ill.  The paper's a bit rough still, but here's what I found:

To make a long story short, Tim Gill, Jared Polis, Pat Stryker, and Rutt Bridges made a decision in 2004 that they were dissatisfied with Republican control of Colorado and thought they could change partisan control of the state with an appropriate allocation of huge sums of money.  For Gill and Polis, in particular, the politics had a personal angle; they're gay, and the state government had taken a number of recent stances against gays and lesbians.  Due to state and federal campaign finance laws passed on 2002, individual donors and the state parties were limited as to how they could affect and target races, but this small group of individuals reasoned that some 527s could get around this problem by amassing funds and spending them on election communications in a handful of targeted races.

I find that the 527s created by Gill et al (known collectively as the Roundtable or the Gang of Four) is having a measurable impact on Colorado politics.  I trace their campaign finance reports to determine which Democratic candidates they aided in 2004 and 2006, and I find that those state legislative races targeted by the group saw an average Democratic vote surge of roughly four points.  This is huge -- nearly twice the estimated incumbency advantage in these races.  I also identify six state house races and one state senate race targeted by the Roundtable in 2004 in which the Democrat won by less than four points.  That, it turns out, was enough to flip both houses from Republican to Democratic control in 2004, the same year that Bush beat Kerry statewide by five points.

I spend a little time in the paper trying to assess whether we should consider this new form of organization a political party.  My feeling is that it's close, but not quite.  Schattschneider described a party as "an organized attempt to get control of government," and that's basically what's going on here.  But I'm reticent to call this organization a party simply because they seem almost wholly uninterested in nominations contests.  They managed to rise to power without engendering much pushback from the older party elites or the formal Democratic Party leaders in the state, and for the most part, they pretty much take the nominees that emerge from the primaries and try to get them elected.

It's the growth, not the jobs

John Sides and I have a new piece in today's NY Daily News on the role of the economy in this year's midterm elections.  Quick version: Economic growth predicts elections, unemployment doesn't, and the Dems are losing seats regardless.