Morning in America: Butthurt Achieved

[Wheezer]

I get the appeal of Obama. I understand the problems people have with Mitt. But I will spend some time contemplating the problem you have with "Believe in America."

His Mormonism isn't disqualifying. More, the many in the GOP's overt, and Romney's subtle, injection of religion into the government is.  It makes me tune out pretty much the rest of what such a candidate is trying to say.  Since whoever wins is going to take my money, at least don't preach to me.

Also, I wouldn't/didn't say the slogan was offensive.  Just that the messaging behind it was a religious appeal.  I find that disqualifying.

I would have as much a problem with a Jewish candidate (or Catholic, or Muslim, or Druid, or...) who ran on the same type of slogan, regardless of party.

You want to preach to me?  Invite me to your house of worship.  Don't do it from an elected position.

This stance I totally get.

What I don't get is how (or why) you project it onto "Believe in America."

There are a thousand things that politicians (more often the GOP) do that lead with religion quite overtly that you could point to without looking for the naked lady in the glass of ice cubes.

The Clam-Plate Orgy might be more on point.

[Quality Start Machine]

 
Who ordered the Cable Pundit Butthurt Racism Combo?

[Slaky]

Who ordered the Cable Pundit Butthurt Racism Combo?

not me but now I want Portillo's.

[Internet Apex]

Who ordered the Cable Pundit Butthurt Racism Combo?

This type of rhetoric (and that evil campaign slogan, natch) is the number one reason why I high-tailed it out of the Republican Party. I'm no Democrat. I voted for exactly one (and Biden) this election. But it's not just minorities and poor people they're alienating with this horse shit.

[Quality Start Machine]

Who ordered the Cable Pundit Butthurt Racism Combo?

This type of rhetoric (and that evil campaign slogan, natch) is the number one reason why I high-tailed it out of the Republican Party. I'm no Democrat. I voted for exactly one (and Biden) this election. But it's not just minorities and poor people they're alienating with this horse shit.

If you really want to fuck with people, tell them the picture they took at Chick-Fil-A and posted on Facebook was the reason you voted for Obama.

[J. Walter Weatherman]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/after-obama-re-election-ceo-reads-prayer-to-staff-announces-layoffs/2012/11/09/e9bca204-2a63-11e2-bab2-eda299503684_story.html

For the chairman and chief executive of Murray Energy, an Ohio-based coal company, the reelection of President Obama was no cause for celebration. It was a time for prayer – and layoffs.

Robert E. Murray read a prayer to a group of company staff members on the day after the election, lamenting the direction of the country and asking: "Lord, please forgive me and anyone with me in Murray Energy Corp. for the decisions that we are now forced to make to preserve the very existence of any of the enterprises that you have helped us build."

On Wednesday, Murray also laid off 54 people at American Coal, one of his subsidiary companies, and 102 at Utah American Energy, blaming a "war on coal" by the administration of President Barack Obama."

Murray Energy is the country's largest privately owned coal mining company, with about 3,000 employees producing about 30 million tons of bituminous coal a year, according to its Web site.

The company was the subject of an article in the New Republic that said the company had forced miners to attend a Romney campaign speech in southeastern Ohio in August. Murray denied the account. The New Republic also reported that Murray Energy employees have given more than $1.4 million to Republican candidates for federal office since 2007.

[J. Walter Weatherman]

From November 5...

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/11/project-orca.php

The Democrats like to think that their "ground game" is the tie-breaker that will give them the edge in a tight election, but this year there is reason to believe that the Democrats' efforts will be equaled, if not exceeded, by those of the Romney campaign. The Romney campaign is not only well-funded, but is run by one of the best organizers and managers of his generation, the candidate himself. Whom would you count on to organize anything, Mitt Romney or David Axelrod? Tonight the Romney campaign, for no obvious reason, sent out this description of Project Orca, which is just one weapon in its Election Day arsenal:

...

Sounds impressive. Let's hope it works!

November 9...

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/11/09/romneys-get-out-the-vote-fiasco/

The story of how monumental a failure Project ORCA was on Election Day was first reported by a volunteer, John Ekdahl, on the Ace of Spades blog. After tweeting the article, I was contacted by several other volunteers who were eager to explain in greater detail just how many things went wrong with Project Orca on Tuesday.

...

Shoshanna's experience was far from unique. Starting in the early afternoon, reports were coming in from across swing states that ORCA had crashed. That morning, when Shoshanna was on the phone with Boston, she was told the system was crashing, unable to withstand thousands of simultaneous log-ins. The system had never been stress tested and couldn't handle the crush of traffic all at once. Thousands of man-hours went into designing and implementing a program that was useful on one day and one day only, and on that day, it crashed. My source familiar with the campaign described it this way, "It was a giant [mess] because a political operative sold a broken product with no support or backup plan. Just another arrogant piece of the arrogant Romney campaign."

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/inside-team-romneys-whale-of-an-it-meltdown/

To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed application consulting firm.

Real CEOs management consultants know it's important to outsource your critical infrastructure.

But Orca turned out to be toothless, thanks to a series of deployment blunders and network and system failures. While the system was stress-tested using automated testing tools, users received little or no advance training on the system. Crucially, there was no dry run to test how Orca would perform over the public Internet.

...

Before Election Day, volunteer training at Boston headquarters amounted to a series of 90-minute conference calls with Centinello. Users had no hands-on with the Orca application itself, which wasn't turned on until 6:00 AM on Election Day.

...

In a final training call on November 3, field volunteers were told to expect "packets" shortly containing the information they needed to use Orca. Those packets, which showed up in some volunteers' e-mail inboxes as late as November 5, turned out to be PDF files—huge PDF files which contained instructions on how to use the app and voter rolls for the voting precincts each volunteer would be working. After discovering the PDFs in his e-mail inbox at 10:00 PM on Election Eve, Ekdahl said that "I sat down and cursed, as I would have to print 60+ pages of instructions and voter rolls on my home printer. They expected 75 to 80-year old veteran volunteers to print out 60+ pages on their home computers? The night before election day?"

...

This sort of failure is why there's a trend in application testing (particularly in the development of public-facing applications) away from focusing on testing application infrastructure performance and toward focusing on user experience. Automated testing rigs can tell if software components are up to the task of handling expected loads, but they can't show what the system's performance will look like to the end user. And whatever testing environment Romney's campaign team and IT consultants used, it wasn't one that mimicked the conditions of Election Day. As a result, Orca's launch on Election Day was essentially a beta test of the software—not something most IT organizations would do in such a high-stakes environment.

IT projects are easy scapegoats for organizational failures. There's no way to know if Romney could have made up the margins in Ohio if Orca had worked. But the catastrophic failure of the system, purchased at large expense, squandered the campaign's most valuable resource—people—and was symptomatic of a much bigger leadership problem.

[J. Walter Weatherman]

Meanwhile, on Planet Messina...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/01/inside-president-obama-s-reelection-machine.html

In Iowa, for example, Bird & Co. are preparing for the Democratic caucuses as if they were contested. Their first paid staff members arrived in Des Moines nearly two years ago, and now Obama's Iowa operation—eight offices, a dozen staffers, hundreds of volunteers, 1,280 official events, 4,000 one-on-one conversations, and 350,000 calls to supporters—likely surpasses that of any Republican running. Bird's plan is to treat Caucus Night like a massive statewide organizing session, "training [caucusgoers] for what we have to do and giving them specific goals, because the general election will kick off that night." A week later, Obama volunteers from Massachusetts will flow across the border into New Hampshire, practicing for next November. "The primaries and caucuses allow us to test our systems," Bird explained. "Do we have car-sharing systems online so that people can car-pool? Do we have people from Springfield, Mass., going into Nashua [N.H.] always, so they get to know the organizers, so they get to know the turf they're walking, so they get to know the people they're talking to? It's just a big opportunity."

The opportunities aren't limited to the early primary states, either. In North Carolina, Obama staffers and volunteers used last year's mayoral race in Charlotte, which will host the 2012 Democratic convention, as a dry run for the general, road-testing their voter-registration and turnout tactics "with an actual election coming up, so there were deadlines and people were focused the way they will be next year," according to Bird. By Election Day, supporters of Anthony Foxx, the Democratic incumbent, had made more than 200,000 phone calls—10 times his challenger's tally. Foxx wound up winning by 35 percentage points. Meanwhile, similar operations are already underway in more than a dozen key swing states, including Ohio, where volunteers teamed up with labor groups last November to sink Gov. John Kasich's ban on collective bargaining, and Arizona, where the campaign has already opened three offices and recruited a Latino candidate for Senate. As one Republican strategist from Raleigh, N.C., recently told The New York Times: "This is real. I've seen it. I'm coming off the front lines—it ain't fun and we better be ready."

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/victory_lab/2012/02/project_narwhal_how_a_top_secret_obama_campaign_program_could_change_the_2012_race_.html

Permanently linking the campaign's various databases in real time has become one of the major projects for Obama's team this year. Full data integration would allow the campaign to target its online communication as sharply as it does its offline voter contact. When it comes to sensitive subjects like contraception, the campaign could rely on its extensive predictive models of individual attitudes and preferences to find friendly recipients. In the case of Cutter's blast, that might mean pulling email addresses only for those who had identified themselves as women on their registration forms and whose voter records included a flag marking them as likely pro-abortion rights.

More broadly, Narwhal would bring new efficiency across the campaign's operations. No longer will canvassers be dispatched to knock on the doors of people who have already volunteered to support Obama. And if a donor has given the maximum $2,500 in permitted contributions, emails will stop hitting him up for money and start asking him to volunteer instead. Those familiar with Narwhal's development say the completion of such a technical infrastructure would also be a gift to future Democratic candidates who have struggled to organize political data that has been often arbitrarily siloed depending on which software vendor had primacy at a given moment.

[J. Walter Weatherman]

http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/

For all the praise Obama's team won in 2008 for its high-tech wizardry, its success masked a huge weakness: too many databases. Back then, volunteers making phone calls through the Obama website were working off lists that differed from the lists used by callers in the campaign office. Get-out-the-vote lists were never reconciled with fundraising lists. It was like the FBI and the CIA before 9/11: the two camps never shared data. "We analyzed very early that the problem in Democratic politics was you had databases all over the place," said one of the officials. "None of them talked to each other." So over the first 18 months, the campaign started over, creating a single massive system that could merge the information collected from pollsters, fundraisers, field workers and consumer databases as well as social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the swing states.

...

The magic tricks that opened wallets were then repurposed to turn out votes. The analytics team used four streams of polling data to build a detailed picture of voters in key states. In the past month, said one official, the analytics team had polling data from about 29,000 people in Ohio alone — a whopping sample that composed nearly half of 1% of all voters there — allowing for deep dives into exactly where each demographic and regional group was trending at any given moment. This was a huge advantage: when polls started to slip after the first debate, they could check to see which voters were changing sides and which were not.

It was this database that helped steady campaign aides in October's choppy waters, assuring them that most of the Ohioans in motion were not Obama backers but likely Romney supporters whom Romney had lost because of his September blunders. "We were much calmer than others," said one of the officials. The polling and voter-contact data were processed and reprocessed nightly to account for every imaginable scenario. "We ran the election 66,000 times every night," said a senior official, describing the computer simulations the campaign ran to figure out Obama's odds of winning each swing state. "And every morning we got the spit-out — here are your chances of winning these states. And that is how we allocated resources."

...

Data helped drive the campaign's ad buying too. Rather than rely on outside media consultants to decide where ads should run, Messina based his purchases on the massive internal data sets. "We were able to put our target voters through some really complicated modeling, to say, O.K., if Miami-Dade women under 35 are the targets, [here is] how to reach them," said one official. As a result, the campaign bought ads to air during unconventional programming, like Sons of Anarchy, The Walking Dead and Don't Trust the B—- in Apt. 23, skirting the traditional route of buying ads next to local news programming. How much more efficient was the Obama campaign of 2012 than 2008 at ad buying? Chicago has a number for that: "On TV we were able to buy 14% more efficiently ... to make sure we were talking to our persuadable voters," the same official said.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/the-obama-campaigns-technology-the-force-multiplier/

Another truly important change was in the technology itself. "Cloud computing barely existed in 2008," Mr. Slaby said.

This time, the Obama campaign's data center was mainly Amazon Web Services, the leading supplier of cloud services. The campaign's engineers built about 200 different programs that ran on the Amazon service including Dashboard, the remote calling tool, the campaign Web site, donation processing and data analytics applications.

Using mainly open-source software and the Amazon service, the Obama campaign could inexpensively write and tailor its own programs instead of using off-the-shelf commercial software.

"It let us attack and engineer our own approach to problems, and build solutions for an environment that moves so rapidly you can't plan," Mr. Slaby said. "It made a huge difference this time."

"Community organizer." LOL!

[Wheezer]

Who ordered the Cable Pundit Butthurt Racism Combo?

not me but now I want Portillo's.

Screw cable, we've got American Family Radio.

So what they did, and it's brilliant even while cynical, is they hooked women to Obama through these Hollywood stars. These women were saying well 'George Clooney loves President Obama,' and a fair number of them I'm guessing said, 'so I love President Obama,' and the same thing with Sarah Jessica Parker. That to me, and this is obviously an overstatement, that to me is not what the Founding Fathers envisioned that when they were hoping for a well-informed electorate being advised of the issues and studying the issues, no, what we've devolved to is 'I love George Clooney, George Clooney loves President Obama, therefore I love President Obama.'

[CBStew]

[what they did, and it's brilliant even while cynical, is they hooked women to Obama through these Hollywood stars. These women were saying well 'George Clooney loves President Obama,' and a fair number of them I'm guessing said, 'so I love President Obama,' and the same thing with Sarah Jessica Parker. That to me, and this is obviously an overstatement, that to me is not what the Founding Fathers envisioned that when they were hoping for a well-informed electorate being advised of the issues and studying the issues, no, what we've devolved to is 'I love George Clooney, George Clooney loves President Obama, therefore I love President Obama.'

[/quote]

So...women were motivated to vote for Obama because of George Clooney and Sarah Jessica Parker?  More proof that I just don't understand women.

[J. Walter Weatherman]

So what they did, and it's brilliant even while cynical, is they hooked women to Obama through these Hollywood stars. These women were saying well 'George Clooney loves President Obama,' and a fair number of them I'm guessing said, 'so I love President Obama,' and the same thing with Sarah Jessica Parker. That to me, and this is obviously an overstatement, that to me is not what the Founding Fathers envisioned that when they were hoping for a well-informed electorate being advised of the issues and studying the issues, no, what we've devolved to is 'I love George Clooney, George Clooney loves President Obama, therefore I love President Obama.'

So...women were motivated to vote for Obama because of George Clooney and Sarah Jessica Parker?  More proof that I just don't understand women.

No. Women who already supported Obama were more motivated to donate to his campaign when offered a chance to win a dinner with them.

http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/

In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obama's campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49. The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney — and Obama.

So as they did with all the other data collected, stored and analyzed in the two-year drive for re-election, Obama's top campaign aides decided to put this insight to use. They sought out an East Coast celebrity who had similar appeal among the same demographic, aiming to replicate the millions of dollars produced by the Clooney contest. "We were blessed with an overflowing menu of options, but we chose Sarah Jessica Parker," explains a senior campaign adviser. And so the next Dinner with Barack contest was born: a chance to eat at Parker's West Village brownstone.

For the general public, there was no way to know that the idea for the Parker contest had come from a data-mining discovery about some supporters: affection for contests, small dinners and celebrity. But from the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means. "We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign," he said after taking the job. He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official "chief scientist" for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions.

[Wheezer]

"Community organizer." LOL!

In vaguely related news, my downstairs neighbor interjected this evening, in a mildly boozy bull session in which she had gotten on to her election work after describing some hilarity over the U. of C. precincts being assigned ballots in Chinese that they couldn't give away for love or money, that the Hyde Park/Kenwood "Alinsky crowd" never liked Obama and gave her shit for her early support.

Oh, and, THANKS A BUNCH, PAULQAEDA.

[Armchair_QB]

So what they did, and it's brilliant even while cynical, is they hooked women to Obama through these Hollywood stars. These women were saying well 'George Clooney loves President Obama,' and a fair number of them I'm guessing said, 'so I love President Obama,' and the same thing with Sarah Jessica Parker. That to me, and this is obviously an overstatement, that to me is not what the Founding Fathers envisioned that when they were hoping for a well-informed electorate being advised of the issues and studying the issues, no, what we've devolved to is 'I love George Clooney, George Clooney loves President Obama, therefore I love President Obama.'

So...women were motivated to vote for Obama because of George Clooney and Sarah Jessica Parker?  More proof that I just don't understand women.

No. Women who already supported Obama were more motivated to donate to his campaign when offered a chance to win a dinner with them.

http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/

In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obama's campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49. The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney — and Obama.

So as they did with all the other data collected, stored and analyzed in the two-year drive for re-election, Obama's top campaign aides decided to put this insight to use. They sought out an East Coast celebrity who had similar appeal among the same demographic, aiming to replicate the millions of dollars produced by the Clooney contest. "We were blessed with an overflowing menu of options, but we chose Sarah Jessica Parker," explains a senior campaign adviser. And so the next Dinner with Barack contest was born: a chance to eat at Parker's West Village brownstone.

For the general public, there was no way to know that the idea for the Parker contest had come from a data-mining discovery about some supporters: affection for contests, small dinners and celebrity. But from the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means. "We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign," he said after taking the job. He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official "chief scientist" for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions.

So they pimped out the president? Nice.

[J. Walter Weatherman]

So what they did, and it's brilliant even while cynical, is they hooked women to Obama through these Hollywood stars. These women were saying well 'George Clooney loves President Obama,' and a fair number of them I'm guessing said, 'so I love President Obama,' and the same thing with Sarah Jessica Parker. That to me, and this is obviously an overstatement, that to me is not what the Founding Fathers envisioned that when they were hoping for a well-informed electorate being advised of the issues and studying the issues, no, what we've devolved to is 'I love George Clooney, George Clooney loves President Obama, therefore I love President Obama.'

So...women were motivated to vote for Obama because of George Clooney and Sarah Jessica Parker?  More proof that I just don't understand women.

No. Women who already supported Obama were more motivated to donate to his campaign when offered a chance to win a dinner with them.

http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/

In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obama's campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49. The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney — and Obama.

So as they did with all the other data collected, stored and analyzed in the two-year drive for re-election, Obama's top campaign aides decided to put this insight to use. They sought out an East Coast celebrity who had similar appeal among the same demographic, aiming to replicate the millions of dollars produced by the Clooney contest. "We were blessed with an overflowing menu of options, but we chose Sarah Jessica Parker," explains a senior campaign adviser. And so the next Dinner with Barack contest was born: a chance to eat at Parker's West Village brownstone.

For the general public, there was no way to know that the idea for the Parker contest had come from a data-mining discovery about some supporters: affection for contests, small dinners and celebrity. But from the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means. "We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign," he said after taking the job. He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official "chief scientist" for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions.

So they pimped out the president? Nice.

Seems more like "pimping out" George Clooney and Sarah Jessica Parker.