Nate Silver has written a piece called "Why Progressives Are Batshit Crazy To Oppose the Senate Bill."  He says we need to stop being "polite" (who's polite these days?) and start being "real."  In the spirit of impoliteness and reality (realness?), he offers some numbers in order to argue that the Left is nuts not to embrace the Senate health reform bill.

In that same "no-politeness" spirit, here's my response:  Garbage in, garbage out.  Is that "real" enough for ya?   Progressives - and everyone else, for that matter - should keep fighting.

Silver's heart may be in the right place, and his math is right, but many of his assumptions are flat-out wrong.  More importantly, he fails to place his work in the proper human and political context.  It's like this:  You can build the best model in the world for predicting the outcome of hockey games.  But if you knew that sometime during the third period Rahm Emanuel was going to drive out on the ice in a Zamboni and flatten your team's entire defense, wouldn't that change your model a little?  And if you knew half the hockey players would wind up bleeding and broken ... (Oh, wait - they do. Bad example.)

Progressives would be insane to do as Silver suggests.  He tells us that "a picture's worth a thousand words"  (and then gives us 1,795 words - but who's counting).  Let's review both his analysis and his conclusions.   

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John Fund at Americans for Prosperity's Right Online Conference cites Nate Silver's predictions for 2010, and the possibility of the Democrats losing 20-50 seats in the House. Nate talked about this with Ron Reagan Jr. on his radio show the other day and wrote about it at his blog Likely Voters and Unlikely Scenarios where he qualifies his predictions with this:

Is it possible that the electorate which is voting in November 2010 will be so down on the Democrats that they trust Republicans more on issues like these? Sure, it is possible -- if the enthusiasm gap is wide enough, if Obama's approval is low enough, if the health care debate has been bungled enough, and if the economy is still hemorrhaging jobs. But I'd consider it something of a worst-case scenario. That's probably the best way to regard these Rasmussen polls for the time being.

So maybe not quite as doom and gloom as Fund is making it out to be. As for the rest of his nonsense, well that's another matter. Fund goes on to claim that the Democrats' problem is they don't know how to govern as moderates. Heh. That's rich. Yeah, here we are again as Fund says, but not because the Democrats are governing from the left, but because they're governing as triangulating corporate "centrists".

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Nate Silver breaks down the numbers for us on the influence of lobbyists on blocking health care reform and who those lobbyists are likely to target. Nate has more at FiveThirtyEight: Special Interest Money Means Longer Odds for Public Option.

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Keith quotes Nate Silver's latest debunking of the right wing talking point that the Democrats are out to destroy the Republican owners of car dealerships. He also takes Rep. Vern Buchanan to task for voting against the stimulus package and then complaining that the United States is "supposed to be in the business of creating jobs, and not killing jobs".

As Keith said....WTF???

Note to faux outraged Republicans...what Nate said...

News Flash: Car Dealers are Republicans (It's Called a Control Group, People) :

A meme that is currently picking up traction in the conservative blogosphere is that the list of dealerships to be shuttered as a result of Chrysler's bankruptcy contains a disproportionate number donors to Republican candidates. There have been furious efforts to prove this contention by looking up campaign contributor lists at the Huffington Post, Open Secrets, and other places.There is just one problem with this theory. Nobody has bothered to look up data for the control group: the list of dealerships which aren't being closed. It turns out that all car dealers are, in fact, overwhelmingly more likely to donate to Republicans than to Democrats -- not just those who are having their doors closed.

Last time we checked in with Nate, he was busy getting cursed at by wingnut radio talk show host and "documentary filmmaker" John Ziegler for daring to question a poll Ziegler commissioned that purportedly "proved" that Obama voters were somehow misinformed, and therefore Obama only got elected because his supporters are dumb. I'm sure Ziegler would disagree with that characterization, but it's pretty clear that's what he's supposedly trying to prove. The transcript Nate posted of their first exchange was rather lively. This second encounter doesn't disappoint.