OK, I remember that lot; they had a chief economist who ran a rather good blog and published this chart about the sources of the government deficit (see this Stabprin post). Then he got to be Vince Cable’s sinister eminence and stuff. I wonder if the ad might imply we might see more of him…
Read More Enduring stare: recruitment editionSo here’s Lord Freud confronted with the public on BBC Radio 5. (Wouldn’t it be nice if rather than the QR code, the BBC Web site offered an embed?) Jesus, what a pathetic mess. If I were a big political party’s spin doctor, here’s something I would do. Rather than send second-division pols on Today…
Read More Let the air inIn which the otherwise estimable Danny Dorling makes the mistake of arguing with someone on the basis of Nicholas Watt’s reporting of their words! The real segregation that Labour failed to tackle was economic. Rich people in rich parts of the country became richer. Poorer parts and poorer people saw far slower improvements in their…
Read More the problem isn’t that immigrants can’t read English, it’s the national press…After the great success of his campaign against Obama RT @SultanAlQassemi Al Jazeera – Sheldon Adelson plans media campaign against Morsy — Tom Gara (@tomgara) December 21, 2012 At times like this it’s practically incumbent to set up as a political consultant/digital agency/constructor-class for wanktanks and take his money. We could hire James Delingpole as…
Read More The dumb money on tour: Cairo editionSo, there’s this from Mike Smithson and IPSOS-Mori: https://twitter.com/MSmithsonPB/status/279216069661564929/ There’s this, from the Indy and ComRes. There’s also this from Patrick “Unseasonably Mild” Wintour: tp://http://t.co/70Ce8csl seriously what is the point of the Conservative Party asking questions as loaded as these – to check messaging ? — Patrick Wintour (@patrickwintour) December 20, 2012 What’s going on?…
Read More Swing voters overwhelmingly picked cake over deathSo, Wired writes up three West Point professors and their algorithm to decide which members of a terrorist network to zap. Apparently they implemented it in 30 lines of Python. The paper is here, with some pseudocode and the tantalising hint that they used NetworkX, but no Python. However, even the Wired piece tells us…
Read More Lib Dems: not quite uselessThe Rude Pundit is characteristically rude about Mitt Romney’s remark that “The president’s campaign, if you will, focused on giving targeted groups a big gift.” Rmoney wasn’t the only one – Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump said something similar on the night – but the interesting bit here is unstated. Rude points out that the…
Read More No, they actually do expect you to vote against your interestsSo I picked a fight with Tom Lee of Sunlight Labs about why a rather good piece on whether the big spenders in US politics actually achieved anything with their money didn’t have any charts. Sunlight reckons campaign money was surprisingly ineffective, and Republicans had the most of it, in a post that surely does…
Read More The smart money and the dumb money in the US electionsSo they put Jimmy Savile in charge of Broadmoor? Even if you didn’t know he was a rapist, that would be…head-burstingly weird and inappropriate. It’s yet another reason to think Chris Morris’s life work is a documentary. So, whodunnit? A valid question, especially as Grant Shapps, the man with two faces and half a brain,…
Read More so who was a health minister in 1987-88?Economics is an agenda-setting system. Here’s a working example – Noah Smith engaging Robert Gordon (who is in his turn drinking from the poisoned well of Tyler Cowan). Gordon’s big idea is that y’know how things aren’t so great? Well, they’re always going to be awful, so there’s nothing can be done about it! And…
Read More Economic reality is yesterday’s political choice