The Supreme Court is hearing the case between the FCC and Fox Television about “fleeting utterances” of obscenity. This is the case of Nicole Ritchie saying at the Billboards awards
“it’s not so fucking simple" to remove "cow shit out of a Prada purse."
There is the typical legal mumbo jumbo back and forth, but at one point Justice Stevens asks whether the FCC ever
"takes into consideration that the particular remark was really hilarious?"
Now that’s what I call a brilliant legal argument…
First the good. A very simple statement from the NY Times. You may not like the liberal paper, but I thought these words from the editorial page were excellent:
This is one of those moments in history when it is worth pausing to reflect on the basic facts:
An American with the name Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a white woman and a black man he barely knew, raised by his grandparents far outside the stream of American power and wealth, has been elected the 44th president of the United States.
Hugely powerful.
Then this from MSNBC.com:
Most notably, Obama managed to defeat John McCain without generating a significantly higher percentage of black voters than John Kerry turned out four years ago, according to exit polls. Nationally, black voter turnout was 13 percent, a modest jump from 11 percent in 2004
Most notably? Hello. Do you have any idea what a 2 percent jump means over the whole country? That would be Ohio and Florida. Which would be the entire election.
Lame analysis…
This is why critical reading skills are so important.
Well it was a historic night indeed. I didn’t even stay up late because it was so clearly over early. I was watching on InTrade some of the contracts for individual states (mainly Florida, North Carolina and Indiana). In every case, InTrade gave you an advance notice of who would win.
The most interesting thing to me was on the Indiana contract. It was obviously very close and that was reflected on InTrade. Look at the graph for Indiana from about 7:45 to 10:00 PM:
This is the Obama contract for Indiana. So the amount indicates the percentage likelihood of Obama winning the state of Indiana, according to the InTrade market.
So my question is, what happened at 9:30? For about 15 minutes the market seriously believed that McCain would win Indiana, but then the market swung back. So did one county in Indiana release their numbers and it made people think McCain would pull it out? Was there a strange rumor?
Very curious…
I’ve posted before about my fascination with predictive markets. In an election season InTrade is especially fascinating. During the primaries you could watch how candidates “stock” would rise or fall on the actual primary day and get an early (and accurate) prediction of the winner before the networks announced anything (presumably people are betting based on some inside information on exit polls).
So this article was hugely interesting to me. Apparently a single “institutional” member on InTrade was deliberately bidding up the overall McCain for president contract value. There is one contract that you can trade for the overall chance of McCain (or Obama) winning the election and there is also a contract for each state for who will win that state. This person was bidding up the overall contract, but not the individual state contracts.
I do recall a point after the Republican convention where if you added up all of the states electoral votes based on who InTrade was prediction you would forecast an Obama win, but the overall contract was predicting a McCain win. Markets are supposed to be rational, but this one was clearly not.
Now we know why. But we don’t know why this person was doing it. A McCain fan with money to throw around? Did he/she really think that InTrade could drive the conventional wisdom and influence the election? There aren’t enough people as geeky as me for that to work…
If you haven’t seen Obama and McCain at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, check out the videos. This is a charity event where the candidates traditionally roast themselves and each other. The speeches are about 15 minutes each. Both are hilarious.
OK, I have small children so I pretty much never watch Comedy Central even though I do like John Stewart. Parents may chuckle at the fact that I remember him from Elmopalooza (which, if you have small children, is excellent by the way). But I do check out The Daily Show on the web from time to time.
John Stewart had an interview with an author who I don’t know, and they were discussing people who come to Ground Zero for a photo op and then leave and bad mouth New York. This author had the great quote:
…the east coast was American enough for Al Qaeda, so it should be American enough for them.
After a bit more discussion, she said:
It’s great to have this show where you can just say stuff…
You can like or hate The Daily Show, but that cracked me up…
I don’t know how else to describe this description of stupid voters…
No, this isn’t a commentary on our economic crisis. This is a strange real estate story. A friend of ours is a real estate lawyer and he dabbles in real estate in Brooklyn. He knows this guy and the other night he told me this story…
Back in the day (turn of the century), 99 year leases on commercial buildings were common. To hedge against inflation the leases would commonly have a “gold clause”, which basically said that the owner could request payment in gold.
Following the Great Depression, FDR eliminated the gold standard in 1933. Gold clauses were declared invalid. However in 1977 a court held that gold clauses could be enforced if they were agreed to after 1933 (or something like that – I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV).
Why is this important? My friend knows a guy who was smart, eccentric and in the real estate field. This guy decided to scour the country looking for an existing lease with an enforceable gold clause. It took a year. He found one.
He spent $845,000 to buy the land. The 1912 lease entitles him to $35,000 a year. He asked for it in gold at 1912 prices (1,693 ounces of gold). The current tenant sued, won in the lower court but lost in the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Unless the Supreme Court takes up the appeal, that ruling will stand and the gold clause will be enforced.
At the current gold price of about $880/ounce the annual rent just went from $35,000 to just under $1.5 million. Wow.
You can read about it here…
I try not to be political here, though I think people know my general political beliefs. Here’s an interesting “truth” type site.
I like the “flip-o-meter” which measures flips flops:
From McCain:
From Obama:
Using the strategic petroleum reserve
Public financing of his campaign
From Palin:
From Biden:
Whether he wants to be vice-president (this one cracks me up, but I guess I understand – you can’t run for president and say “I’m really just hoping for the VP”).
So there you have it. Our top politicians all suck…
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 