Enoch

that's one of the few because of the very real perceived threat of terrorism. Uh-huh. What about GHWB's big public stand against flag burning? Or Reagan's made-up stories about welfare moms with welfare Cadillacs? Politicians of every stripe use emotional appeals to voters-- it hardly skews one way or another. OK. You were surprised. Probably because you believe that media bias is a significant influence on peoples' opinions when it isn't. Ultimately, most people aren't convinceable based on what happens in an election, even where there is a mile-long record of bad policy and poor leadership. Because, when the chips are down, people would rather ignore contrary facts than admit that they were wrong in their prior belief in a particular candidate/party. (This phenomenon should feel familiar to anyone who has argued on the internet. )

which tends to fall into liberal territory, almost by definition. The 2004 Bush campaign's emphasis on supporting the troops and being tough on terrorists was a perfect example of a conservative candidate effectively using emotional impact in its pitch to the public. again, immaterial. certainly mccain did not help his own prospects, and i've pointed out previously that the 6% margin was in spite of his lack of quality. in other words, it is surprising he did as well as he did given his obvious (to me) deficiencies and the almost certain tilt in nearly every media outlet in the country towards obama. obama's deficiencies were simply ignored by the media, all of them. I think we're reading the margin of victory very differently. You seem to think it's insignificantly small. In a nation that has proven over and over again over the past couple decades to be a pretty close 50/50 split between the parties as currently constituted, 6% is a rather huge gap. The vast majority of the people who actually showed up to vote knew which party the would be voting for years ago. A 6% difference in the totals displays either enormous shifts in turnout among each side's base, or a substantial majority of the "convincable" voters going to one side.

To who? Is this a fact? Well, I think that "prolonged" is pretty indisputable. Sure, the states were voting on the same schedule, but it was pretty clear where the Republican primaries were going by Feburary/March, while the Democratic primaries were up in the air until the summertime. "Interesting" is probably in the eye of the beholder, but I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that public interest in general was higher in the Hillary-Barack race than it was in seeing McCain slowly add to his delegate total after everybody else but Huckabee had conceded.

Where you see institutional bias, I see mostly marketing and cost-consciousness. If a story is very complicated, it gets under-reported because news editors/producers know that long, involved segments lose audience interest, and these stories are expensive to research and produce. If a story has a strong emotional impact, it gets over-reported because those stories tend to be simple and tend to hold the audience's interest (and the first african-american major party candidate for the presidency does have a huge emotional impact for a lot of people). If a story has a runaway truck on fire, they would interrupt the moon landing to broadcast it. Among major news organizations I only see the kind of institutional bias you're talking about in a few organizations. There are a few places where the bias comes down from the top and is pretty pervasive in stuff you mention like story selection (NYT, NPR, Murdoch's media empire, etc.). But they're the exception rather than the rule, and the predelictions of those organizations are well known enough that their effect on actually swinging public opinion is pretty minimal. Particular to this campaign, the chronology of events made a difference in coverage. The Democratic primaries were far more prolonged and interesting than the GOP primaries, which led to more coverage. Also, the skill with which the candidates' campaigns manage the media matters, too. And Obama's people ran circles around McCain's in this area-- Obama got better media coverage because his people pitched the media a better story to tell. (The opposite was true in 2004; Bush's media management strategy easily outclassed the Kerry campaign.) IMO, "media bias" in this case is a red herring thrown out by people who don't want to face the fact that McCain lost because he was a not-particularly-effective candidate tied to the policies of a very unpopular incumbent from his own party. (The same can be said of many other GOP candidates for lesser offices.) This depressed turnout among those more apt to support his party's platform, at the same time that Obamamania and Bush-fatigue was increasing turnout for the other side.

Of all other forums and blogs that are out there, this is the most sane one from a republican point of view. I sense a Ron Paul-lite message on the incoming election. The Republicans wouldn't get 30% of the vote with that kind of platform. Pull the pro-"traditional values" planks out of the GOP platform, and all of those religious voters who currently turn out to vote "R" because of abortion, gays, school prayer, etc., are going to be in play. Poll these kind of voters on questions on taxes, social security, healthcare, education, etc., and they're actually more in-line with the Democratic platform than with the GOP. IMO, 90% of perceived media bias is actually marketing. The press favors the emotional angle because the emotional sells a heck of a lot more papers than the practical. (Emotional stories are also much easier and cheaper to write.) News organizations decide on their target demographics, and craft their publications to confirm the biases of that audience. But, the only effect that this kind of bias has on elections is in confirming people's pre-existing opinions. (Liberals read the NYT and listen to NPR, become more liberal, and vote for liberal candidates; Conservatives do the same with the WSJ and Fox News.) Other than that, I think that the ethos that motivates people to pursue a career in journalism jives more closely with a leftish values system. (Whereas a more conservative values system would lead them to get a "real job" in the business world.) So most journalists do tend to favor liberal opinions. Of course, opinion is not bias, and the better reporters can prevent it from becoming so. Sure, some does leak through, but certainly not enough to meaningfully affect an election that was won by an overall 6% margin.

The Clash -- Koka Kola

The pressure from the cost side might end up being more significant than any change in demand. To make a AAA game, you've got to pay the salaries of a pretty large team of developers for a couple years before you see your first dollar of return. That means that you need some pretty serious financing. All kinds of businesses are finding it much tougher and more expensive to convince lenders to advance them funds, and every additional dollar that goes into financing has to be accounted for, either by cutting costs, raising the price, or lowering profits for ownership. I wouldn't be surprised to see a few major game projects fall apart because the increase in financing costs made their original budget projections obsolete.

Thanks. The house was built 43 years before I was born. Their isn't much room for new single-family homes inside the Beltway-- the only new construction you see is on lots where the previous house has been torn down. We're in a rather nice neighborhood, though, and the place has been well maintained (with the exception of the detatched 1-car garage, which badly needs a new roof, and possibly wholesale reframing, too).

Repetitive filler combat (often respawning) put in place to increase the estimated playtime. I'd rather play a 10-hour game with 10 hours of interesting content than a 20-hour game with 10 hours of interesting content and 10 hours of tedious padding.

I am now a homeowner! We closed on the new house last Friday, and moved on Saturday. It still feels all weird, like we're on some kind of vacation where we happen to have brought everything we own. But making the commute into work this morning (which is only about 10 minutes longer than it was before) probably helps start up a new routine. And, hopefully, the cable/internet hookup will go OK today (the wife is at home taking care of that-- she gets more paid vacation time at her job than I do) so we won't feel quite so cut off from the outside world. The move went OK. 2 complications: First, the boxspring for our bed ("queen" size) would not fit up the stairs into the master bedroom (which I probably should have foreseen). So, yesterday we went to buy a King-sized bed (which uses 2 twin-size boxsprings) which will be delivered later in the week. (We got a nice deal from a warehouse/overstock seller because it had a small hole poked in the fabric on the side.) The second, more amusing complication happened when the movers had finished and were getting ready to leave-- they locked the keys to the moving truck in the cargo area. They apparently had some kind of hammer and chisel in the cab of the truck, though, and spent 20 minutes using that to knock the padlock off of the rear door.

The whole wealth-redistribution argument as it was used in this campaign was really quite silly. Both candidates are on the record supporting programs that redistribute wealth in various ways, and neither of their platforms or backgrounds are significantly different in that regard.

Thanks. I had missed where the skill list was disclosed. I must say that I'm disappointed that only 4 of the 10 are non-combat skills.

Well, it's a short game, but I wouldn't necessarily call it shallow. It is continually introducing new concepts and building on them, so it rarely feels like you're solving the same puzzle over and over again. And the art and music is top-notch. There's a free demo. If you enjoy it, the rest of the game is well worth the $20.

No. The current representative system is written into Article I of the Constitution. It would require huge amounts of political capital to even get the conversation started in that direction, and, ultimately, the resulting policies wouldn't be all that different. For good or ill, in the States, there's a lot of reverence for the 1789 Constitution. There have been a few periods of major changes made to it (most notably, the initial Bill of Rights, the Civil War amendments, and the efforts of the early-1900s Progressives), but otherwise, there has been great resistance to anyone questioning the wisdom of the "founding fathers."

Yeah, that's the nature of American "catch-all" parties. In other democracies, people often vote for single-issue parties, with the expectation that its members will compromise with other parties in order to achieve their goals on their one big issue. In America, we force the voters to do the compromising, which probably produces stabler political systems but also leads to more voter disaffection and cynicism.

By the way, on the wider issue, Obama's official campaign platform doesn't mention gun issues at all, and his response to the Heller decision took a balanced approach, emphasizing local solutions:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Someday Sand you are going to wake up and realize that that vast majority of your fellow citizens do believe in God in some form or another. Including the founding fathers of your country who had the wisdom and foresight to spell out that unalienable right DO come from God and not from man. If rights came from man then man could take them away. So if you value your freedom it actually behooves you to be at least a little religious. But I was just using a phrase for emphasis the post in question. I think his point was more about the "gun" part of the question rather than the "God" part. I can see tossing God rhetoric into the argument if you're talking about freedom from coercion or imprisonment, but it's a bit of a stretch to say that God protects material good A but not material good B. If the government can't ban a class of material possessions like guns because God gave them to mankind, the same argument could be used to toss out limits on crystal meth and child pornography. Nah, gun rights are restrictions on lower levels of governments (Congress and the States) given by a higher level of government (the Constitution). These rights were created for entirely practical, rather than philosophical, reasons.

I suspect that you're correct. Many of the gains that the Democrats have gotten in Congress are in areas where gun rights are a big deal to the voters. The party leadership doesn't have much of an incentive to put all those new representatives at risk by forcing them to decide between voting their party and voting their district. I doubt that gun issues will be on their agenda at all. As for the Supreme Court, the most likely appointments in the next 4 years would all be replacements for Justices who were in the minority in Heller anyway. I'm sure the Court will be asked to deal with the consequences of that decision at some during the Obama administration, but it's unlikely that any Obama appointees wouldn't affect the outcome of those cases.

The cross-platform release pretty much guaranteed that from the get-go.

Also, as it's a lower-level game than MotB, we probably won't be seeing as many swarms of high-level spell effects that tend to cause the biggest performance hits.

It could be challeneged under the federal 14th Amendment (Loving v. Virginia is actually a better precedent than Brown for this point), but the Supreme Court as currently composed would not be particularly likely to agree with the plaintiffs. (This is why all the court decisions on gay marriage over the past few years have been grounded in state law only-- even where the state Equal Protection Clauses and Due Process Clauses are identical in language to the federal one, the SCOTUS can't overturn a state supreme court that is interpreting only the law of that state.) State constitutions may grant rights that the federal Contstitution does not, but to the extent that they deny rights that are guaranteed by the federal Constitution, they are not valid. Personally, I think that Loving is directly on-point, and that, 50 years from now, bans on gay marriage will be viewed in much the same way that bans on interracial marriage are viewed today. But, with the notable exception of the Warren Court in the 1950s-1970s, the judiciary is usually one of the last institutions to adapt to societal changes. (For the bulk of U.S. history, the federal courts have effectively been "activist" in favor of conservative ideologies.)

Yeah, if the projections hold out, Ohio cinches it. The called "blue" states plus CA, OR, WA, and HI (4 states that the GOP hasn't a prayer of taking) makes 272.

Gene Ammons -- Confirmation Charlie Parker cover, from the excellent Boss Tenor album.

The only results in VA so far are all out in hick country (or, if you prefer "real America"). McCain will lead until the precincts in NoVa and Tidewater start reporting. The shocking thing to me so far is Indiana. Bush won there by 20% 4 years ago, and now it's neck-and-neck, with zero results so far from the Chicago suburbs in the NW of the state.

It could be effectively over pretty early. If FL, VA, PA, and OH all go one way or the other, there probably isn't much point in staying up to hear the results from out west. Sure, we won't "know" anything, but we can guess with 99.9% accuracy at that point.