"Nate Silver fared terribly in Thursday's UK election... The fault, Silver claimed, was with the polling."

Don't blame Silver, says Silver. He only processes the data he gets from polls done by other people.

"The World May Have A Polling Problem," Silver asserted. "In fact, it�s become harder to find an election in which the polls did all that well."... "[T]here are lots of reasons to worry about the state of the polling industry," Silver concluded, citing a range of factors. "There may be more difficult times ahead for the polling industry."

Well, that's awfully bland... from Dylan Byers at Politico, who was only processing the raw material Silver gave him. Can I blame Silver? For anything, ever? He cited "a range of factors." Were they too dull and meaningless to be worth more than the repetition of the conclusion that polls just aren't that good?

ADDED: The NYT surveys some analysis of what went wrong with the polls:

�It could be simply that people lied to the pollsters, that they were shy or that they genuinely had a change of heart on polling day,� [said Alberto Nardelli, writing in The Guardian], �Or there could be more complicated underlying challenges within the polling industry, due, for example, to the fact that a diminishing number of people use landlines or that Internet polls are ultimately based on a self-selected sample.�...

�What seems to have gone wrong is that people have said one thing and they did something else in the ballot box,� [said Peter Kellner, the president of YouGov, a leading survey firm]. �We are not as far out as we were in 1992, not that that is a great commendation.�...

Rem Korteweg, a senior research fellow at the Center for European Reform in London, said... �People say who they are voting for with their heart and then vote with their wallets,�...

To tweak Korteweg's point: People say what they think will make other people like them, but they do what they think is in their interest. Re-tweak: People do what is in their interest, which is to say what they believe is socially desirable, and that won't square up with what they do when no one's looking. If this is the problem, it's a problem that will get worse as it becomes more widely believed that liberalism makes you look good. Korteweg is contributing to the contagion of this belief by saying that in their hearts people are liberal, nudging us all to say I'm a liberal, so I'll seem to be a person with a heart.



(Detail about that video here.)

"The latest attack on Walker is that he has 'up to' $50,000 in credit card debt to � wait for it � Sears."

"The Daily News does the hit on Walker, from the angle of it proving he�s not really a fiscal conservative.... Hello, it�s SEARS!... I don�t see how any of this hurts Walker."

Well, there's one thing that was proved a long time ago about Scott Walker: If you strike him down, he will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.

I live in Madison, Wisconsin, surrounded by people who � I think � are thinking How the hell did this happen? We crushed him with 100,000 protesters. We destroyed him....

Do not attempt to destroy The Walker. 

I don't know what that man bought at Sears, but maybe you should be shopping at Sears. Maybe something in the appliance department... maybe the tools... I don't know. Be careful, people.

"Resistance is not part of civil disobedience."

"Civil disobedience is a symbolic non-violent violation of the law.... The act must be nonviolent, open and visible, illegal, performed for the moral purpose of protesting an injustice, and done with the expectation of being punished."

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin instructs, explaining the arrests of the high school students who, protesting the police shooting of Tony Robinson, may have resisted police efforts to relocate them from the street to the sidewalk.

"In the future, while all of these protests are evaluated on a case-by-case basis, MPD will not be facilitating extended street closures."

In the past, the police have facilitated protests that took over the street. During the big protests of 2011, we saw police cars blocking the streets so cars could not get through. We've had it personally explained to us by a police officer that redirecting the cars was considered the best approach.

I don't know what the precise policy is, but I note the word "extended" in the mayor's statement. I guess the police will facilitate your street-blocking protest in Madison, but not for too long. I hope it means that where there are marches confined to the sidewalks (or State Street), police ought to stop traffic to let the whole march cross an intersection as a single, densely packed group. But the phrase "on a case-by-case basis" hints of: 1. something that permits flash-mobbish takeovers of the streets, and 2. something that could be applied � consciously or unconsciously � in a way that is not viewpoint neutral.

"Dozens of high school students protesting the fatal police shooting of Tony Robinson closed down one of Madison�s main thoroughfares for eight hours Tuesday..."

"... as police, taking a largely hands-off approach, redirected the crawling streams of traffic to side streets."

The protest began around 10:30 a.m. when dozens of students walked out of East [High School] and gathered on East Washington Avenue in front of the school. By 1:30 p.m., students from West High School, who held an earlier rally on Regent Street, and other protesters joined the students from East, eventually blocking all six lanes of traffic....

Shortly after 6:30 p.m....police declared the event an unlawful assembly and began moving people toward the sidewalks. Several demonstrators who refused to comply were arrested.

Police said four people were arrested and another 11 were cited and released. Derrick McCann, 29, was arrested and received a citation for �causing or obstructing the street, sidewalk, alley or crosswalk.� �I feel like it�s really a civil rights movement,� McCann said. �I didn�t do anything wrong ... we were peaceful.�

A county official is caught on surveillance cameras letting protesters into the City-County Building (which houses the Madison Police Department).

Dane County Board Sup. Leland Pan has had to give up his pass card and keys after what he did on the night a Madison police officer shot and killed a young black man:

�Our resources were stretched extremely thin, yet the protesters grew in numbers and their anger increased as they neared the police department,� [Madison Police Chief Mike Koval said in a letter of complaint]. �In addition to commissioned officers working in this building 24 hours a day, there are civilian employees. Quite frankly, these civilian employees were very scared for their safety.�

Building surveillance video doesn�t show much emotion on the faces of people coming into the building shortly after midnight on March 7, but Koval said the protesters were heard yelling things such as �kill the cops� and �we have guns too.�...

This makes me think about the way � back in March 2011 � protesters got into the Wisconsin State Capitol, entering through a window of the offices of one of the Democratic legislators. Meade was there and filmed it:
Click for more �

What's so bad about Scott Walker's "If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the globe"?

"I think the bust of Fighting Bob La Follette is kind of Soviet-like," says Meade, reading the previous post about the Islamic iconoclasm in Mosul and anti-Soviet iconoclasm in the former Soviet states (and the preservation of Soviet sculptures in Lithuania).

Here's a picture I took of the monumental head on February 25, 2011, a little over a week after the big protests had begun in and around the Wisconsin capitol:



I originally blogged that here, with other photographs, including one showing how some protesters had used the back of the Veterans Memorial as a component of what they called their "Information Station." 

And let me use this post to comment on something Scott Walker said at the end of his CPAC speech yesterday. What would he do about ISIS? "If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the globe." That was bad, obviously, and Walker has sent his spokeswoman to rephrase what was supposedly in The Head of Walker. (I'm saying "The Head of Walker" because I'm picturing a "Soviet-like" head of Walker some day, in the capitol, eye-to-eye with Bob La Follette, which would be the "more speech" alternative to iconoclasm.) The spokeswoman said:

Governor Walker... was in no way comparing any American citizen to ISIS. What the governor was saying was when faced with adversity he chooses strength and leadership. Those are the qualities we need to fix the leadership void this White House has created.

There's still a problem. How would the form of leadership demonstrated during the protests transfer to the war on terrorism? Scott Walker's approach to the protests was to let them play out � replete with loud chanting and drumming and lots of taped up signs in the capitol and huge marches outside � all the while knowing he had the votes in the legislature to pass the law that the protesters were protesting. He chose silent inaction, putting up with it, in a situation where he knew he'd win in the end, and, in fact, when the legislation finally passed, the protests ended. There was still the recall effort, and there was plenty more speech lambasting Walker, but Walker knew all along he had the upper hand, and instead of trying to counter the speech of the protesters (or even to get them cleared out of the capitol), he sat back and let them have what probably looked to most Wisconsinites like a big tantrum. He knew that the protesters knew that they could not cross the line from semi-organized protest to anything like violence or the threat of violence. The no-response response was therefore effective.

Is that the kind of leadership he's proposing to use in the war on terror? It can't be. The relevant component of leadership that I'm seeing is something I associate with George W. Bush: silent acceptance of abuse from his critics. Walker said "If I can take on 100,000 protesters," but he didn't take them on. He let them carry on. That may have been wise under the circumstances, but it tells us close to nothing about what he would do with enemies who won't limit themselves to protesting and when he can't control the outcome through partisan domination of a legislature. Sheer cockiness won't do the trick � "If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the globe." And that was a cockiness beyond what we saw � and got tired of � in George Bush.

The return of the "Shame!" chant to the Wisconsin state senate.

"#RightToWork passes 17-14, gallery shouting "Shame." #wipolitics" � video at the link.

Here's the "Shame!" chant of February 25, 2011.