Filibuster ≠ nullification

I've got to strongly disagree with Kevin Drum on this one. Drum says that minority obstruction powers in the U.S. Senate, allowing one senator to hold up legislative business, are the equivalent of nullification, the early-19th century theory that a state could negate a law imposed by the federal government. In the case that Drum cites, the outcomes are roughly similar. That is, a Republican senator is refusing to allow the appointment of an Obama administration nominee, essentially shutting down the oversight board to which the nominee was appointed. Yes, this has roughly the same effect as preventing the federal government from enforcing a duly passed law. But the means are very, very different, and that matters.

The filibuster, construed as any form of minority obstruction in the Senate, is legal, subject only to the rules of the Senate, which the Senate may determine for itself. Nullification runs flatly against the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution. Just because the outcomes may be the same doesn't make them equivalent. The assassination of federal officers would similarly obstruct the enforcement of federal laws, but that doesn't make it the same thing as filibustering appointees.

Yippee ki yay, Momofuku

I'm currently attempting to make the Corn Flake Chocolate Chip Marshmallow Cookies from the Momofuku Milk Bar's cookbook. I have to say, this is a somewhat frustrating cookbook. If you're unfamiliar with it, the Momofuku Milk Bar is a series of restaurants in New York City specializing in high-end desserts made from surprisingly pedestrian ingredients. These cookies, for example, contain Corn Flakes, powdered milk, mini-marshmallows... probably stuff you have in your pantry but never thought to put in cookies. Oh, and tons and tons of butter. But don't let the low-end ingredients fool you; the author, Christina Tosi, has a lot of fancy techniques she insists are essential (creaming butter and sugar for eight minutes, using a paddle and stand mixer rather than a hand mixer, forming the cookie dough on a tray and refrigerating it for hours, etc.). And the dishes are shockingly labor-intensive.

The book seems to assume that the reader has some familiarity with the dishes at the restaurant. There are not a lot of illustrations telling the reader, say, what the final product should look like. Anyway, I followed the cookie recipe precisely and came up with this:

That just can't be right. And it was pretty frustrating, since I started with what was easily the best cookie dough I'd ever tasted. I tried several times and couldn't help coming up with enormous, flat cookies. I found this variation of the recipe online and followed the suggestion of freezing the dough, thinking the fridge wasn't cool enough for the cookies to hold their shape. Nope. I'm not sure what shape they're supposed to be in, but I'm pretty sure it's not the one I've got.

After a little experimentation, I've lowered the temperature to 350F, cut each dough ball in half (the original recipe called for scooping them in a 1/3 cup measure), and reduced the cooking time from 18 to 11 minutes. I tried cooking them on a baking stone, but as you really need to have them cool before removing them from the tray, the Silpat seems to work a lot better. Here's what I've got now:

Again, given the thinness, they're still coming out more like lace cookies, but the flavor is quite good. I don't know why my cookies won't hold their shape (whatever that shape is supposed to be) -- whether I failed to whip the butter properly, whether it's an altitude thing, or what. But still, yummy.

I've also made the Crack Pie and will serve it to my guests tonight. More details later when I find out how it came out.


Update: The Crack Pie was a hit. Tastes like pecan pie without the pecans.

Six days from Iowa -- stuff to know

I'm teaching a class on party nominations that conveniently starts the same day as the Iowa Caucuses and ends the week of Super Tuesday. Anyone want to bet on whether the Republicans have a nominee before my class is done? Anyway, here are some important links I'll probably be using in class:

• Josh Putnam explains the delegate allocation rules for all the Republican contests. The quick version: the GOP has made some slight nods toward proportionality, but the contests are still overwhelmingly winner-take-all.
• Also from Putnam: the primary & caucus calendar. He's even put together a version you can download for iCal, Outlook, or Google Calendar. Total stud.
• Matt Glassman thinks Romney is the near-certain nominee, but explains why everyone has an incentive to make the contest seem more uncertain than it really is.
• Ron Paul seems to be cruising toward a win in Iowa, and Nate Silver thinks Paul will do better than the polls currently predict.
• Jonathan Bernstein handicaps the current Iowa poll standings, noting the volatility and closeness of the contest. Basically, anyone other than Huntsman and Gingrich has a non-trivial chance of winning.
• I predicted Newt's collapse a month ago, but whatever. Predicting Newt will lose is like predicting Rocky will win (episodes II through V only).

The party, deciding: Virginia edition

Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich have failed to qualify for Virginia's Republican presidential primary. Gingrich has responded typically with bombast and inappropriate historical metaphors. But rather than criticizing the campaigns as incompetent or Virginia's rules as bizarre, we might note what this means for our understanding of party nominations.

One of the things that party insiders provide for their preferred candidates, in addition to money and endorsements, is expertise. That covers a wide range of things, including people who know how to read polls and put together ads and basically run a campaign on a national scale. But it also includes people who understand the arcane rules of nomination contests in the 50 states. Those rules can get weird. For Virginia, a candidate needs 10,000 valid signatures, including 400 from each of the state's 11 congressional districts. Pennsylvania Democrats vote for delegates, rather than candidates, and Hillary Clinton had some problems there in 2008 when her campaign failed to find a full slate of loyal delegates prior to the primary. Caucuses bring their own level of weirdness that primaries lack. Texas has both a primary and a caucus.

The point is that someone with insider backing within the party doesn't usually make mistakes along these lines. They're provided with people who can avoid these snafus. That doesn't mean that outsider candidates can't achieve this level of expertise -- notably, Ron Paul made the Virginia ballot -- but it's a lot harder when you don't have the backing of party elites. This is one of the ways that party insiders pick winners.

Update: Important point from Josh Putnam: This is the first time that the Virginia GOP has bothered to validate signatures. They now do so as a result of an independent candidacy for the state legislature in 2011. Again, a well-backed presidential campaign would know these details, but this is an important wrinkle.

F-ing polls -- how do they work?*

Roger Simon has written one of the most anti-intellectual columns of the week, asking whether polls are really "magic." Not only does he appear not to know how polls arrive at the answers they do, but he seems to have no interest in learning. He even falls back on the classic "they never call me" trope. Some highlights:

I have never been called by a political pollster and don’t know anybody who has, but I know some pollsters, who assure me they don’t make the numbers up, and I believe them.

Pollsters, or rather the phone-bankers who make call after call (or computers that make robo-call after robo-call) do get people to talk to them. Not vast numbers of people, but pollsters do not require vast numbers.

[...]

We are a nation of nearly 313 million people. So how many people did the pollsters actually speak to? If you have extremely good eyes, you can find the answer in tiny type at the bottom of a chart: The Post-ABC poll was conducted by phone “among a random sample of 1,005 adults.”

That represents 0.0003 percent of the nation at large. (The number of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents was an even smaller sample of 395 people.)

[...] 

This poll has a very good reputation and I “believe” the results in that I believe they were calculated carefully and (unlike some partisan or campaign polls) without any agenda.

[...] 

Does Obama really lead Gingrich by 8 percentage points in a (currently) imaginary matchup?

I dunno. Sounds right to me. But I am an even smaller sample than 0.0003 percent.

You really don't need to be a statistician to understand this stuff. Why can a survey of 1,100 people be accurate in telling us how the whole nation is thinking? The metaphor I always liked was a blood test. For a doctor to determine if there's a problem with your blood, she doesn't need to remove it all -- she can just extract a small vial. This vial of blood represents the rest of your blood well because it's constantly being mixed up, so that a few cc's of your blood in your arm looks like the blood anywhere else in your body.

It's the same thing in surveys. You can poll a fairly small number of people as long as you can be confident that you're getting a representative sample of American voters. (Talking to your friends and neighbors? Not representative. Calling people randomly across the country? Much better.) And some relatively simple math can tell you just how likely it is that your sample believes what the rest of the country believes. Picking 1,100 people for a survey means you have a margin of error of roughly 3%. That means there's a 95% chance that the actual population is within three percentage points of what your sample believes. Pollsters have settled on that as a pretty reliable margin. You could get it down to 2%, but only by interviewing lots more people, driving up the costs of the poll considerably without improving its accuracy by much.

The sad thing is that Simon has an audience who might really appreciate a better understanding of how polling works, but he decided to waste their time with some blather about how polls are magical and therefore beyond our understanding. They're not, and Simon's readers deserve better.


*Must credit Brendan Nyhan for the Insane Clown Posse reference.

A socialist blog post

Newt Gingrich, 1989:

The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.

I'm actually hard-pressed to think of an idea that Gingrich opposes that he has not summarily labeled "socialist." Perhaps, at other times, he has uttered these words:

I expect you to put my groceries in plastic bags. The idea that you'd use paper bags is essentially a socialist argument. 

I wanted half-and-half in my coffee. 2% milk is the path to socialism. 

I certainly hope that the band's absence represents a short intermission and that they will soon return to the stage to perform "Free Bird." If this is the end of the show, then the socialists have won. 

Bella should stick with the free-enterprising Edward. Everyone knows werewolves are socialists.

Feel free to add more.

Who's enforcing journalistic standards?

Marc Herman has some interesting stories about the relationship between publishers and journalists, helping to explain why he released his work on Libya as an Amazon Single. I found this passage particularly compelling:

In traditional publishing, particularly books, the impulse to enforce professional standards comes more and more from the reporter and less and less from the editor. This suits me, but it’s the reverse of how things usually go. Traditionally, the reporter pushes to include material. The editor evaluates the material’s appropriateness. The final balance of source and information happens in the editor’s office, not the reporter’s notepad. 

A dramatization of the system a lot of people know comes from the old movie version of the reporter’s classic All the President’s Men. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, as the reporters, want to run a damning story about the President. Jason Robards, as the editor, keeps telling them they haven’t got the story yet. 

Great in a 30 year-old movie. In my 20 years, I’ve never had an editor say that. I’ve said it to editors lots — that I don’t have it yet.