Are independents a lost cause, or just slow?

Nate Silver produces an interesting chart showing approval ratings of congressional Democrats over the past few months, broken down by party affiliation and marking events related to health care reform:

He notes that when a chamber passes HCR, it seems to produce a boost for Democrats among the base, while independents don't seem to react at all.  This leads him to argue that Dems might as well pass the thing -- it'll help the base, and independents won't care.

This is probably true, although note the pattern among independents.  They don't seem to move in the time period right after chamber passages, but they move downward in the time period right after that.  So it's possible that independents aren't reacting to these events, but it's also possible that independents are reacting, just more slowly than the partisans.  This is consistent with a lot of what we know about independents from Zaller and others -- they don't follow political events as closely as partisans, their interpretation of events is mediated by others, etc.

Silver is probably right that approval of congressional Dems by independents can't get much lower, although we should also keep in mind that most people always hate Congress anyway.

Romanoff not dead yet

Andrew Romanoff picked up some pretty big labor endorsements today, the United Food and Commercial Workers and the Colorado Teamsters.  These are not trivial endorsements -- they come with election labor, the kind that can flood precinct caucuses and affect primaries.  Others would know better than I about the endorsement histories of these unions, but it's rare for such prominent groups to throw their weight behind candidates they don't think can win.  I assume they're motivated both by their history with Romanoff and some recent polling suggesting Romanoff might be a stronger candidate in the general election.

The odds are still rather long for Romanoff.  Bennet has a huge financial advantage (the president's visit next week will only increase that), and the bulk of major endorsements are currently going Bennet's way.  But the odds are somewhat less long than they were a week ago.

My daughter, the toaster

Wow, my Phantom Menace post has generated 21 comments so far.  That's a record for this blog.  Probably reveals a good deal about the nature of my readership.

At any rate, while we're on the subject of prequels that purport to show the origins of great cinematic badasses, I'm pleased to report that Caprica does it right.  The first three episodes, which take place about six decades before the Galactica series starts, have chronicled the creation of the first Cylons on Caprica. Don't read on if you don't want to know...

Well, I won't say too much, except to note that it was a stroke of brilliance that the creation of the Cylons, which will eventually lead to the near-annihilation of humanity, began with an act of love -- a grieving father trying to resurrect his daughter.  Yes, it's also an act of profound hubris, making the punishment somewhat justified, but given Graystone's talents and resources, would any of us not follow in his path under the same circumstances?

Also, good choice to cast Esai Morales as Bill Adama's father.  (Weren't Morales and Edward James Olmos brothers in Mi Familia?)  The show's handling of ethnicity is quite interesting, with the Taurons (the Adamas' ethnic group) functioning as a kind of Arab/Latino blend.  Caprica, with its advanced technologies and beautiful cities, is clearly meant to represent the U.S., while immigrants from other worlds live in modestly-assimilated enclaves and complain about discriminatory treatment by the Caprican government.

The show's discussion of religion and terrorism is great.  The pilot begins with a terrorist act committed by a group of secret monotheists -- a precursor of the religion the Cylons will follow decades later.  Caprica and Galactica remain probably the most mature and thoughtful fictional treatments of 9/11 that television has seen.

It's not totally obvious where the plot is going at this point, but it appears that deep inside every Cylon beats the heart of a brilliant but bratty teenage girl, which makes all kinds of sense.

Geek break: In defense of The Phantom Menace

I am in agreement with pretty much everything Eric says about the Star Wars prequel trilogy.  Regardless of quality, those films are morally repugnant, and they thoroughly cheapen Anakin's transformation from perky grade schooler to evil incarnate.  And I thank one of the commenters for linking to Patton Oswalt's brilliant routine on the subject.

That said, I do not think the films are uniformly bad.  "Revenge of the Sith," for all its flaws, I maintain, was superior to "Return of the Jedi," although I concede that's not saying much.  And while my early reaction to both "Phantom Menace" and "Attack of the Clones" was that they were irredeemable trash, I have come to believe that the former actually has several kernels of quality film in there that just aren't fully realized.

One of the recurring themes in "Phantom Menace" is the idea of symbiosis.  Qui-Gon describes the midi-chlorians as symbiotic beings, living off our cells yet providing us with guidance from the Force.  We are frequently told that both Jedi and Sith travel in pairs -- a master and an apprentice.  Each needs the other. Beyond that is the suggestion that good and evil are never found alone.  The light and dark sides of the Force are, in a sense, symbiotic.

And yet the great irony is that the Jedi, while teaching about symbiosis, seem blind to these relationships.  The concept that evil might be nearby continues to escape them.  They are slow to perceive the Sith threat.  And Qui-Gon, for all his preachings, fails to acknowledge his dependence upon his padawan, Obi Wan.

This failure on Qui-Gon's part is best articulated wordlessly, through the three-way light saber duel at the end of the film.  This duel, by far the best and most creative of the entire six-film series, conveys story in a way that George Lucas' ham-handed dialogue cannot.  Darth Maul is fierce and talented, but he knows he will lose against two Jedi unless he can separate them.  This is his entire motivation early in the fight.  Rather than going for an early kill, he instead tries repeatedly to kick one of them away from the action so he can focus his energies on the remaining one.  He ultimately succeeds in this and lures Qui-Gon further away from Obi Wan, a task that is only possible because of Qui-Gon's short-sightedness.  Remember early in the film when Obi Wan talked about being mindful of the future, and Qui-Gon advised him to keep focused on the present?  That blindness killed Qui-Gon.  In later films, a similar blindness by the Jedi would lead to similar results.

All this is to say that there were a lot of interesting ideas and themes bandied about in the film that served the entire trilogy well.  They were, of course, buried under some pretty crappy filmmaking.  Lucas has a real knack for sucking the life out of actors.  The principal actors of the prequel trilogy were much more talented than those of the original series, but Lucas still managed to make them all sound like middle-schoolers in a class play.  And the film also gets very boring at times and generates needless plot holes.  And then there's Jar Jar.  But still, there's interesting material in here.  Attention must be paid.

"Attack of the Clones," by contrast, is pure shit.

Giving up privacy can be cool

I took my son skiing today at Winter Park, about a 90 minute drive northwest of Denver.  I enrolled him in the ski school for the morning.  Unbeknownst to me, the ski school fitted him with some sort of LoJack ankle bracelet created by a company called Flaik.  We turned in the device at the end of the day, and they gave us a card with an ID number on it.  When we got home, we got to see my son's entire day of skiing:

The information in there is fantastic.  Not only does it show every lift and run he took, but it also reports his speed, elevation, and total distance skied at any point during the day.  (That graph at the bottom shows elevation over time.  You can see our lengthy lunch in the middle there, plus the two runs we did at the end of the day near the bottom of the mountain.)  You can replay the day to see where he was at any given moment.

If I get the chance, I'll strap one of these on me the next time I ski.  It's nice to have a record of the day, and also to know how fast I ski.  But I can't help finding something slightly creepy about the whole thing.  Ah, it'll pass.

The perception of corruption

I'm confused by Ezra Klein's recent post about Lawrence Lessig. Ezra agrees with Lessig that there's a crisis of faith in the American political system, in that many Americans believe that their governing system is hopelessly corrupted by money. But Ezra also claims that the system itself is not really corrupt. So what to do? Get the money out of politics.

If what you're attacking isn't just money in politics, but the perception of money running politics, you can't content yourself with half-measures.

This strikes me as perverse. If the system is not corrupt but people believe that it is, the solution can't be to drive out corruption. It's not corrupt! And people will clearly believe it's corrupt irrespective of the reality.

I'm not sure what the solution here is - I'm not often impressed with civic education efforts - but tinkering with institutional rules to change perceptions strikes me as both risky and doomed.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Put some bigotry in your Tanc

Wow.  Apparently Tancredo was muzzling himself the whole time he was in office.  Now that he's out of the government, he can let you know how he really feels.

In his speech Thursday to [Tea Party convention] attendees, former Republican congressman Tom Tancredo invoked the loaded pre-civil rights era buzzword, saying that President Barack Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country."