Is Microsoft the new Digital Equipment?



  ¶ 12:31 PM

Student loan insanity
This is nuts. Absolutely nuts. People paying off student loans into their 60s and for the rest of their lives? ... They've got to put a cap on the amount of loans people can get -- or do something. It's madness.  ¶ 3:02 PM

The Petraeus Scandal: There's a Monica Lewinsky angle!
Hopelessly confused by the Petraeus Scandal? Can't tell the difference between the Lady in Yellow and the Julia Louis-Dreyfus Lookalike Mistress? Desperately need a protagonists scorecard? Join the club! ... But Henry Blodgett has performed a great public service by putting together a one-stop, bullet-by-bullet recap of the drama as it's so far unfolded. ... By God, think I'm going to get hooked on this one. There's even a Monica Lewinsky angle, sort of, if you count Monica's former attorney being involved in the case as an angle -- and I do! ... It's all so sad. It really is. And pathetic it. It's a disgrace. I deplore it. ... Just keep giving me more of the gossip! ... 


  ¶ 2:00 PM

'Dumbed-down conservatism'
With people like Bobby Jindal urging change, maybe there's hope yet that conservatism can be rescued from the 'conservative movement.' ... Hub Blog and Reader No. 1 have been exchanging emails on this subject since the election: Can Republican conservatism reform itself? I still have my doubts. Their  partisanship and principals are so interwoven that they can't distinguish between the two. It's their Gordian knot. They need power to implement their principles, so they adopt hyper partisanship as a means of achieving those principles. But the hyper partisanship in pursuit of power ends up trumping the principles. They simply won't crack down on the loudmouths and crazies and buffoons in the movement. It's ironically quasi Leninist: Any enemy of their enemy is a friend. In many ways, it's ultimately a tactical problem that's hurting their cause. They just don't see it. ... Conservatism desperately needs its own Sister Souljah Moment.  ¶ 1:20 PM

'I mean Jeezus!'
Brighton Reader, who's an experienced campaign hand, marvels at how wretchedly bad Project ORCA turned out:

Romney's election day operations sound like a disaster. His volunteers deserved much, much better. The whole thing, from the secret website no one could try out ahead of time, to having everything directed from Boston, no one answering the phone, I mean Jeezus! I have worked on campaigns using index cards and lists of voters that were marked off manually and it worked very well. Even the name ORCA sounds ridiculous. Talk about a beached whale. And when those staffers were ordering up a fireworks display, didn't they remember Red Auerbach's famous words after the Celts beat the Lakers in 1969 NBA finals? Something about balloons?

  ¶ 9:09 AM

Trouble at the Garden
No, not the Celtics. Instead, the Globe has a terrific piece on the Romney campaign’s crashing “ORCA” system on election day at the Garden:

(At) Boston’s TD Garden, where 800 Romney workers were staffing phones and computers in coordination with the field workers to oversee the turnout, the surge in traffic was so great that the system didn’t work for 90 minutes, causing panic as staffers frantically tried to restore service. Some campaign workers also reported that they had incorrect PINS and had not been informed that they needed certification to work at polling places. 

“The Garden definitely kind of buckled under the strain,” Zac Moffatt, the campaign’s digital director, confirmed in an interview. “The system wasn’t ready for the amount of information incoming.”

But don't get me wrong: I'm worried about the Celtics too. 
  ¶ 6:38 AM

‘Project ORCA’
Via Reader BK, here’s a good behind-the-scenes look at what happened at Mitt’s election-night HQ in Boston. He also gets into the Romney camp’s vote-tracking “Project ORCA” fiasco. Here’s more blistering criticism of “Project ORCA.” … Not many people truly believe the Orca system’s failure is the main reason for Romney’s loss. But it's a piece of the failed-campaign puzzle.

Via Reader No. 1, here's a good Peggy Noonan piece, largely arguing Democrats ultimately wanted it more than Republicans:

While GOP voters were proud to assert their support with lawn signs, Democratic professionals were quietly organizing, data mining and turning out the vote. Their effort was a bit of a masterpiece; it will likely change national politics forever. Mr. Obama was perhaps not joyless but dogged, determined, and tired.

She's also calling for, or hoping for, some genuine soul-searching among Republicans and conservatives:

The great challenge for the Republican Party now is how to change its ways without changing its principles. Its principles are right and have long endured because they're right. But do all the party's problems come down to inadequate marketing, faulty messaging, poor candidates? Might some of it be policies, stands, attitudes? 

That will be a subject here in the future. For now, in politics as in life, you have to play the hand you're dealt. You have to respect reality. Which is where conservatism actually starts, seeing what is real.

As I've noted before, I'm not sure Tuesday's defeat was clear and decisive enough to bring about genuine and necessary soul-searching on the right. The problem in the past has been the "conservative movement's" meshing of hyper-partisanship with principles and, humans being humans, the hyper-partisanship almost always trumps the principles, obscuring realities. It's tribal emotions trumping rational intellect. Here's an example of what I'm talking about: I'll bet you some conservatives are reading this right now and are roughly thinking, But liberals do it too! Which is exactly my point about how everything seems to come back to partisan/tribal points of views and arguments. That isn't soul searching. That isn't sticking to principles. That's finger pointing. That's tit-for-tat partisan tribalism. That's not the type of reality they should be focusing on.
  ¶ 8:03 AM

‘I was wrong’

RE no 'deep reflection and second thoughts,' I would give the defeat more than 8 hours before making that judgment. For some conservatives, there won't be reflection. But keep in mind for many conservatives, 'deep reflection and second thoughts' = surrender to the broad spectrum of progressive concepts, trends and shibboleths, and that's not going to happen, nor should it. 

  ¶ 2:21 PM

The Massachusetts jinx continues and … Scott Brown for governor?
Michael Dukakis. Check! John Kerry. Check! Mitt Romney. Check! … Three Massachusetts party nominees bite the dust in recent presidential elections. Do you think the rest of the country is trying to tell us something? Rejecting Massachusetts pols in three of the last seven general elections? … Hmmm. Who’s on deck in Massachusetts? There’s no shortage of national dreamers here. Deval? In his mind, yes. In the real world, no. …  I wouldn’t rule out an Elizabeth Warren presidential run one day, knowing her ego and ambitions, but it’d probably be more of a quixotic Paul Tsongas type of candidacy, if it ever happened. … Btw: Pay no attention to that prognosticator blogger behind the curtain! (Hey, at least I put the prediction out there. I was just off by a little bit.) ... Btw II: Check out Mitt's concession speech. It was very classy. He really did do everything he could to win, leaving 'nothing on the field,' as he put it. Mitt's biggest obstacle in this race wasn't him or his views. It was memories of the prior Republican administration that he couldn't overcome. That was the Republicans' main challenge in 2012, no matter who they nominated.
  ¶ 5:01 AM

Hub Blog’s earth-shattering predictions for ’12 elections, Part II
Oh, man. Nate Silver is upping the ante again. He now has Obama’s odds of winning at 90.5 percent. …. I should have followed my doubts – again. … But we’ll see.

Update -- From Brighton Reader:

I don't quite understand why Nate Silver is getting so much attention, and attacks, this year. He has his formulas, explains and defends them at length, and follows the numbers. He was wrong when he predicted the defeat of Harry Reid in 2010, although Jon Ralston, a highly respected Las Vegas Sun reporter, made the correct call. Which to me means we need reporters, not pundits, with the experience and knowledge to evaluate the plethora of prognostications, the history of the state and candidates, and apply their judgment. 

Warren and Obama look like winners to me. Warren is the first state-wide candidate that I know of whose volunteers knocked on doors. Romney needs too many things to go right, and too many polls to go wrong, to get to 270. He never quite closed the deal, and I don't think the Republicans are ready to govern. They haven't had any real debate about what went wrong under George Bush. But I wouldn't be shocked if he managed to do it. The mood of the country seems to have stayed pretty much the same since before the 2006 mid-terms, pessimistic. The electorate is divided, no matter the economic situation each side seems to start with 45%. 

  ¶ 11:51 AM

Hub Blog’s earth-shattering predictions for ’12 elections
Hub Blog can never get too far away from the Ghost of 2010, i.e., my awful election-morning prediction that Martha Coakley would beat Scott Brown in the special U.S. Senate election. In 2010, I ultimately relied on conventional assumptions and stats, even though I could see with my own eyes that Brown’s troops were out in a snowstorm, holding signs and looking pumped for victory. That morning I had my doubts about Coakley winning, even as I predicted she’d win. I should have trusted the doubts.
  ¶ 8:23 AM

'Election Day Puzzles & Questions'
Reader No. 1 looks at the election-day puzzle and sees ... the 2011 Red Sox? It's not that far-fetched of an idea, as he also performs last-minute check-ups on aging rock stars, well-known pollsters, etc.:

There's no one like Bruce Springsteen... so why/how does such a great artist reduce himself to a B-level Woody Guthrie partisan propagandist?   He babbles on tonight in Des Moines about  "blind greed and overreach..." OK, men and women are not angels...  but does he ever wonder about some of those who can afford to buy the best seats at his amazing concerts without a second thought for their paychecks? 

Gotta admire Nate Silver sticking to his projections:  If he's right, he's right.   Am almost half way through The Signal and the Noise, which provides great insight into how Silver builds his election model, as well as an admirable self-criticism about the shortcomings of his prior statistical models for projecting baseball performance, and the valuable data they did not take into account - e.g. scouting reports. Was picking the 2007 Red Sox versus overmatched competitors the equivalent of Obama in 2008, much as the intangibly-tinged, probability-warping expectations of 2011 Sox prove the equivalent of 2012 Obama? Speaking of baseball, hopefully Silver remembers this set of probabilities.  

Dan Drezner nicely summarized what this may or may not mean for the 2012 Presidential Election: .  May the best man win! 

  ¶ 7:32 AM

'On the verge of a solid Romney win,' Part II
When one side starts blaming the weather for faltering momentum, you know they’re in trouble. … But the race is still a coin toss. I can see any number of scenarios unfolding on Tuesday. I still have this hunch that a deep undertow of dissatisfaction is going to help Mitt, not that he or Republicans deserve to win. They don't.

Update -- Nate Silver ups the ante.   ¶ 8:25 AM