"In Fact He Doubled" the Deficit. No! in One Chart

wycats

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Tuesday October 16, 2012 · 7:09 PM PDT

2012/10/16 · 19:09

Early Beta of the Mobile Site

wycats

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Sunday February 27, 2011 · 11:03 PM PST

2011/02/27 · 23:03

Since my last post about the mobile site, I've cobbled together an initial beta of what will hopefully become a much more fully-featured application.

You can take a look at http://dk-beta.strobeapp.com/.

Some limitations as of today:

The site currently provides the front-page only. I will be adding the rec-list and recently-rec'ed diaries in the near future. More features will be added over time.
The site is currently read-only. I will be working with the Daily Kos team to add authentication features to their API so that I can add (at the very least) rec'ing to diaries.
The site is portrait-mode only; this will be fixed soon
There are occasional visual glitches during transitions. Fixing this requires a different strategy for the transitions, and I have a plan for fixing it that I hope to experiment with this week.
After touching "Show Comments", the browser will pause for a few seconds and the comments are inserted. The amount of time is directly proportional to the number of comments. I will resolve this by showing top-level comments first and allowing you to drill into the responses you're interested in.
You can use the back-button to go from a story back to the main page, but you can't use the forward button to go back to a story from the list.
The site is designed for Webkit browsers, including iOS devices, Android devices newer than version 2.2, and recent Blackberry devices running Blackberry 6. I have tested it on the iPhone, and will do testing on Android and Blackberry devices this week. Please report any issues you have with those browsers.

There may be other glitches or issues that I don't know about. Please reply in the comments of this diary or email me directly at wycats@gmail.com to let me know of anything.

Keep in mind that this is still a very early beta, and I wanted to get it out there so people could start playing with it and reporting bugs. Some of the underlying tech will be changing due to issues I encountered during this first pass, so while you should report bugs, don't assume that the current (somewhat buggy) state of things reflects the final version.

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Daily Kos Mobile Update

wycats

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Sunday February 13, 2011 · 11:39 PM PST

2011/02/13 · 23:39

Hi guys,

You may not know me, but I'm the developer who works on Daily Kos Mobile (m.dailykos.com). For the past year, the mobile site scraped content off of the normal Daily Kos site, re-presenting it in a mobile-friendly form. It worked this way primarily to reduce the load on the developers working on DK4, so they could focus on that effort and not on creating new APIs for the old site.

This diary is a status update on the Daily Kos Mobile site, now that DK4 is released.

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Corporations Cannot Have Natural Rights... Duh

wycats

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Sunday January 31, 2010 · 10:36 PM PST

2010/01/31 · 22:36

When I first read through the Citizens United decision that essentially made it illegal to "discriminate" against corporate political speech, I found myself very torn. On the one hand, I'm an extremely avid supporter of free speech rights, and Kennedy wrote the majority decision to tug at my heartstrings:

Premised on mistrust of governmental power, the First Amendment stands against attempts to disfavor certain subjects or viewpoints or to distinguish among different speakers, which may be a means to control content.

On the other hand, something felt wrong.

wycats

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Saturday April 11, 2009 · 8:36 PM PDT

2009/04/11 · 20:36

Last week, Glenn Beck invoked the memory of Thomas Paine to encourage American citizens to protest against Obama's proposals to increase taxes on the wealthy in order to provide the poor and middle class with benefits such as healthcare and improved education.

Ironically, Paine was no libertarian--today, he might even be recognized as a ~~gasp~~ socialist. Given the lionization of Paine by libertarians, and now Beck, you're probably thinking that I'm just inventing this. In fact, the writings I'm about to share with you demonstrate that if Paine was alive today he would probably be to Obama's left, and probably more of an anathema to Beck's kind than our current crop of politicians.

wycats

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday October 21, 2008 · 9:57 PM PDT

2008/10/21 · 21:57

McCain has been going on and on about how Obama's plan to give tax relief to Americans not already paying taxes amounts to socialism or "welfare". In essence, the poor and lower-middle class, because they pay little to nothing in taxes (because they're poor!) should get no relief at all. Instead, the richest Americans should get $100s of thousands, or millions in tax credits, while the poor get nothing.

Interestingly, the exact same criticism applies to his corporate tax plan, which creates new credits and reduces taxes, pushing some corporations that currently pay little to no taxes into getting a check back from the government.

In effect, McCain's corporate tax proposal sends checks to large corporations that are currently paying taxes. Like the bailout, it's fine when applied to big corporations, but "socialism" when applied to hard-working, impoverished Americans.

The Real Facts About Voter Fraud

wycats

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Saturday October 18, 2008 · 3:40 AM PDT

2008/10/18 · 03:40

At this point, the politics of "voter fraud" are pretty clear. Republicans use claims of voter fraud to justify draconian rules and voter purges that are targeted at traditionally Democratic-leaning demographics and geographic areas.

But how do you explain the so-called voluminous cases of non-citizen voting, double voting, deceased voting, and felon voting? Aren't there numerous studies that show that those sorts of fraudulent voters are commonplace?

The talking point is "fraudulent voting is rare" but what are the real facts? Some juicy tidbits:

"Dead voters" typically voted before they died, often by absentee ballot
"Felon voters" are frequently people convicted of more minor crimes, and are actually eligible to vote
The matching rules used to find voters who voted more than once are statistically useless
Virtually none of these cases of fraud would be resolved by a more stringent voter ID law

A report by the Brennan Center in 2007 absolutely eviscerates claims of voter fraud.

wycats

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Wednesday September 10, 2008 · 5:05 PM PDT

2008/09/10 · 17:05

Earlier today, a recommended diary applauded CBS and YouTube for taking down a video by the McCain campaign that (unethically, slanderously, and shamelessly) called Obama a sexist for his "lipstick on a pig" comment.

The ad was basically a lie. It was not, however, copyright infringement. It used a small piece of video from a newscast to make a point, and fell squarely inside the accepted bounds of fair use.

wycats

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday February 06, 2008 · 1:52 PM PST

2008/02/06 · 13:52

Apparently Hillary has loaned her campaign $5MM to keep her anemic (in terms of fundraising) campaign alive after yesterday's stunning close by Barack Obama.

Loaning your campaign money is sure evidence that you're down, but it can also work (who doesn't remember the Deaniac joy at Kerry using his house as collateral for his campaign). Let's show that the grassroots still have Obama's back.

Match Hillary's Millions

http://www.actblue.com/...

Visit the Act Blue page and help prove that we still have Barack's back, and that Hillary's self-financing is not only proof of her weakness, but of Obama's strength.

Let's see if we can help Obama match Hillary's self-funding by raising $10,000 by the DC primary!

It's About the Delegates, Stupid

wycats

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Monday February 04, 2008 · 9:41 PM PST

2008/02/04 · 21:41

Even as everyone repeatedly talks about how tomorrow will be "about delegates," the pre-game spin is still about winning states. In fact, virtually none of the spin is about how the margins in different states affect the delegate counts. This is markedly different from the analysis before a Presidential election, when the discussion is all about the "electoral math."

To try and remedy that, I have put together some numbers that give us a sense of what the playing field looks like tomorrow, in terms of the only numbers that actual count: the delegate count.

To spoil the surprise, we're dealing with a best case scenario for Clinton of: Clinton: 779, Obama: 584. Obama's best case scenario is Clinton: 604, Obama: 759. The middle of those numbers has Clinton slightly ahead, 691 to 671.

Methodology and the full numbers on the flip.

wycats

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday November 30, 2006 · 9:23 AM PST

2006/11/30 · 09:23

As some of you might know, the New York State Senate recently released a document with all of its pork projects for the years 2003-2004 and 2004-2005.

One little problem. It was in a password-protected PDF with images (i.e. non-searchable). Our Republican (and dick) Senate Majority Leader decided to purposely release the information in the most unreadable way possible.

In fact, virtually all news stories posted in the day after the dump (thanksgiving, of course), said nothing other than the vast unreadability of the data.

Our State Assembly, which is run by (slightly less corrupt) Democrats released the information in searchable PDF form with no password.

To make a long story short, I cracked the password and ran the document through some sophisticated OCR (optical character recognition). I then ran it through some slight parsing I wrote to make it more readable. The results for 2004-2005 are now available on The Albany Project's Website for all to see (see the diary).

We've already uncovered some interesting scandal-like behavior (including some from the guy NYBri ran against).

Enjoy!

Favorability Ratings Predicted Senate Races

wycats

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday November 25, 2006 · 2:00 PM PST

2006/11/25 · 14:00

A front-page post on myDD today suggested that favorability ratings were pretty useless in determining the winner of this month's Senate elections.

In a one-off comment, I suggested that once factoring the PVI of a state into the equation, much better results emerge, which come very close to nailing the election results in most cases.

After I made that post, I did an analysis of the 10 widely watched Senate races with incumbents (MI, MO, MT, NJ, NY, OH, PA, RI, VA, and WA), and came up with a pretty good and sane methodology for working favorability ratings into election results.

The results are on the flip.

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"In Fact He Doubled" the Deficit. No! in One Chart

Early Beta of the Mobile Site

Daily Kos Mobile Update

Corporations Cannot Have Natural Rights... Duh

Paine Was a Socialist

McCain's Corporate Socialism

The Real Facts About Voter Fraud

We're So Wrong on Technology

Hillary's Desperate; Push Obama Over the Edge

It's About the Delegates, Stupid

Pork A'Plenty

Favorability Ratings Predicted Senate Races