Follow this link to the article on the Economix Blog of the NYT.  The blog claims to have the purpose of Explaining the Science of Everyday Life.

There are lots of reasons why I like this article.  It explains the dichotomy between what the American voter wants and what the voter is willing to do to get it.

In the NYT article you also get a discussion of this graph:

The picture of me on the motorcycle is only of peripheral importance.

In truth, this can’t be a picture of me. See the sparks flying? I only fall off my motorcycle when I am standing still.

By the way, thanks again to MardyS for putting the link to the article on his facebook page. That’s where I first saw it and decided to add it to my blog.

Following along the premise of the Worcester T & G, AP, and Reuters, I have been keeping track of the losses in my investment portfolio due to Scott Brown being elected Senator from Massachusetts.

By January 21, I had lost $16,685 (on paper).

I won’t know the extent of my losses today until my mutual funds evaluate their portfolios.

See Reuters Confabulates, Too and Mass. Senate race affects market for the precedent that I am following.

The number would have been worse had I not made a trade that prevented a $700 loss.

At $8,000 to $10,000 a day, in one year I project a loss of $2,000,000 in 200 trading days. Very alarming. 🙄  I am so glad there are weekends and holidays when the market is closed.

Well, the weekend is over and so is my Scott Brown losing streak.

On January 25, 2010 I made back $7,500 (on paper) of my losses (on paper). Making a new projection using Friday’s projection method, I should make $1,500,000 by a year from now if the next 200 trading days match this one. 😉

I won’t bother to update this post any further.

Follow this link to the column by Paul Krugman.

This is worth considering while we try to figure out what the right thing is.

If we pass it, and the public gets angry over it, and they turn the Democrats out in 2010 and 2012, will it just get rolled back?  Or will it be too entrenched, although hardly begun, by then?

Seeing this posted on MardenS’s facebook page is what convinced me to post it here.  He subsequently sent me a link to the article Leading Health Care Experts Tell House To Pass Senate Health Care Bill.

Of course  there is this alternative possibility brought up by these experts

Abandoning health care reform–the signature political issue of this administration–would send a message that Democrats are incapable of governing and lead to massive losses in the 2010 election, possibly even in 2012.

I listened to the  thank you conference  call held for Organizing For America volunteers.  There were to be several shifts of these calls.  There were hundreds of listeners on the call I listened to.

I jotted down some numbers as I listened.  There was one item that was somewhat of a measure of the effectiveness of the volunteer effort.

On January 9, a survey was done to ask the supporters of both candidates how many were absolutely certain they were going out to vote.  The result was 73% of Brown voters said they were sure they would vote, 59% of Coakley supporters were sure they would vote,

Several days later (I forget how many) 86.6% of Brown voters said they were sure they would vote and 83.5% of Coakley voters said they were sure they would vote. Imagine what the pundits would be saying if Brown beat Coakley by 16%.  That is the 11% supporter gap closure plus the 5% he actually won by.  I know you can’t really put those numbers together, but it is a measure of how bad it could have been.

So even though we did not win, we shrank a 14% gap in supporters likely to vote by about 11 points.

Volunteers from all over America made over 2.3 million calls into Massachusetts in support of Coakley.

The organizers of the conference call were still in a little bit of a dream world by saying this was not a referendum on Obama, but only a contest between Brown and Coakley.

We volunteers are going to be sending in evaluation reports of our experiences using the tools they provided and our other efforts.  I will be sure to try to wake them up from the dream world they still occupy.

Follow this link to the Reuters story Stocks slide as China curbs lending, IBM weighs posted on Yahoo.

The Dow and the Nasdaq had their largest daily percentage losses since late October and the S&P 500 had its biggest drop since late November, a day after reaching new multi-month highs on bets the Democrats would lose a key seat in Congress.

“There was an expectation in the market yesterday that if the Republican candidate was victorious in (the) Massachusetts (senatorial race), it would be a net positive for the market,” Wedbush Morgan’s James said.

So the Republican candidate did win and we have a huge sell-off.  If I thought there was any sense in these articles, I would still be trying to figure out what it is.

Perhaps one of my dear readers can get beyond the nonsense to find the sense.

I suppose I ought to include this doozy:

International Business Machines Corp (NYSE:IBM – News) fell 3.8 percent to $129.07. An analyst pointed out that the company’s earnings per share outlook for 2010 implies a slowdown in EPS growth compared to recent years.

“IBM reported a good number, but I don’t think it was good enough relative to expectations, and tech is in general selling off,” said James.

According to what I heard on Nightly Business Report last night IBM beat expectations, beat last year, and raised their forecast.  What horrible news 🙂

Follow this link to the Worcester T & G column by Clive  McFarlane. You may learn something about the type of readers that the T & G has, by reading their comments.

Not that it is a really great column, but it is the backdrop that I used to explain my thoughts on what went wrong.

I reprint this here because I have already received one request for an explanation from a friend outside of Massachusetts.  Now I’ll have a blog post to point to if I get anymore questions.

Below is a collection of my comments on the above article.

I agree with CRAIG P. I think Capuano would have made a better candidate.

Martha Coakley ran against Scott Brown instead of running for something.

Since the electorate cannot remember as far back as last March since when their 401K plans have risen 60%, they need a constant reminder of what the plan is.

The plan is to run a deficit until the economy recovers and then start running surpluses, as in the Clinton years, to pay back what we borrowed.

She did not need to refer to Scott Brown to explain this. However, it might have neutralized his mantra that our children will be paying for this deficit for generations.

She could have explained that the Christmas Bomber was spilling his guts to the FBI and that any threats of Waterboarding would be counterproductive.

She could have run with her positive plan for a better way to fight the war on al-Qaida rather than let the ‘She said there were no terrorists in Afghanistan’ meme hang in the air.

She could have explained how good the health care plan was before it got so compromised to appease some wayward Democrats because the margin in the Senate was so thin. This would have brought home the folly of electing Scott Brown without even mentioning his name.

She had absolutely no reason to go negative. She had every reason to tout the positive reasons why she was needed in the Senate.

I forgot to mention that she should have explained that if the federal government quickly cut spending, the economy would go into a tailspin.

She should have explained that the aid to states and cities that was in the original stimulus bill proposal and which Olympia Snowe (R. Maine) removed, in the name of bipartisanship, from the final stimulus package would have saved us from local layoffs and rising local taxes.

She could have explained why we didn’t need more thinking like Olympia Snowe’s, but we needed less of that sort of thing.

I had been emailing ideas like these to the Coakley campaign.  Each time I would get a pleasant reply thanking me for my input.  Too bad she didn’t use any of it.

Follow this link to the AP story in the Worcester T & G.  I imagine it was the T & G that chose the headline. The story was written on the trading day which closed before the polls in Massachusetts closed.

The Dow Jones Industrial average is down 165 points as I write this during the first trading session after the election.  I wonder if the T & G is sticking with their theory that the election affects the market.

Perhaps the market is worried that Scott Brown will accomplish the spending cuts he promised and the economy will dive into a tailspin because of it.

Of course all these explanations for why the market does what it does is pure confabulation.  By confabulation, I mean A psychological term denoting explaining of imaginary patterns in events by the invention of fictitious details.

According to Benoit Mandelbrot’s analysis, the patterns in stock market behavior are made up of fractals which are no patterns at all.

Follow this link to the New York Times column that discusses a sociological study to find out if and why academy is oriented toward the liberal side of the political spectrum.

The study is by Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse. One conclusion they reach is that certain jobs get typecast so that different people choose different careers based on this typecasting.

The column ends with a quote.

To Mr. Gross, accusations by conservatives of bias and student brainwashing are self-defeating. The irony is that the more conservatives complain about academia’s liberalism, he said, the more likely it’s going to remain a bastion of liberalism.

One might also note that conservatives might prefer the higher salaries in the business world to the salaries in academia.

One possible reason why The United States is losing its competitive advantage in industry is that some of the brightest students get lured into Finance and Law because of the higher salaries than even Engineering or Science let alone the Liberal Arts.

Follow this link to the page with suggestions on how to help.

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I post the the link to his inspirational Letter From the Birmingham Jail.

I have heard about the letter, but this is the first opportunity that I have had to actually read it.

It was sent to me in a request for aid to Haiti from Progressives For Haiti. As with all things like this that I post, this link is only for informational purposes.  Of course you decide whether or not to follow the link.  If you do follow the link, you decide what to do in response to the information you find there.