Open Mic June 15

As I watch the EURO soc­cer tour­na­ment, I can’t help wish­ing I could con­trol the head­lines for a major finan­cial jour­nal for a day. Greece has the very unlikely task of beat­ing Rus­sia (and hop­ing the Czechs lose) tomor­row or they’re out of the tour­na­ment.  I really want to be able to run a front page head­line: “GREECE OUT OF EURO!”

@Michael
Good catch!  Though, Ire­land being out doesn’t cre­ate quite the psy­cho­log­i­cal rip­ple that Greece would.
 
Portugal’s got a decent chance to advance from the Group of Death, but they’ll be fac­ing a des­per­ate, tough Dutch team.  Even if Por­tu­gal win (or draw) vs. the Nether­lands, they’ll still need Ger­many to han­dle the Danes in order for them to advance.  It gets com­pli­cated, but a Por­tu­gal win over the Dutch could still see them fail­ing to advance if some­how Den­mark win and score at least 3 against Ger­many.
 
Spain’s chances are even more fun, because (as you noted) Ire­land are already elim­i­nated in their group.  If Spain beat Croa­tia, they win their group, sim­ple enough. They can draw with Croa­tia and still win the group if Italy beat Ire­land by fewer than 4 goals.  But, the Spaniards can lose to Croa­tia and still advance if Ire­land some­how beats Italy (not likely).  Italy just want a  deci­sion in Spain vs. Croa­tia, because that assures them of advanc­ing if (when) they beat Ire­land.
 
(You always know the real soc­cer fans if they under­stand how all the tie-​​breaker sce­nar­ios break down!) 
 
What does soc­cer have to do with pol­i­tics?  Oh, I don’t know, but you might ask  UEFA about the wis­dom of sched­ul­ing a match between Poland and Rus­sia in War­saw on “Rus­sia Day” and how that worked out for them…

Did any­one else hap­pen to catch the recent Har­vard study from Seth Stephens-​​Davidowitz on how sub­tle racism impacts Pres­i­den­tial pol­i­tics? 
 
Instead of look­ing at sur­vey data, where peo­ple might be more reluc­tant to admit prej­u­di­cial atti­tudes to a poll­ster, the Har­vard researchers exam­ined Google search data to exam­ine pat­terns. He used search data from 2004–2007 to estab­lish pre-​​existing racial atti­tudes not yet influ­enced by Obama’s can­di­dacy. Accord­ing to the paper, increased turnout among African Amer­i­cans had a very minor impact on the elec­tion. In areas with high racial search rates, Obama’s race worked against him significantly:

“The results imply that, rel­a­tive to the most racially tol­er­ant areas in the United States, prej­u­dice cost Obama between 3.1 per­cent­age points and 5.0 per­cent­age points of the national pop­u­lar vote. This implies racial ani­mus gave Obama’s oppo­nent roughly the equiv­a­lent of a home-​​state advan­tage country-​​wide.“

Accord­ing to the study, the states with the high­est racial ani­mos­ity were West Vir­ginia, Louisiana, Penn­syl­va­nia, Mis­sis­sippi, Ken­tucky, Michi­gan, South Car­olina, Alabama, and New Jer­sey.
 
The states with the low­est racial ani­mos­ity as indi­cated by the online searches were Utah, Hawaii, Col­orado, New Mex­ico, Idaho, Wash­ing­ton DC, Min­nesota, Ore­gon, Mon­tana, and Wyoming.
 
If there really was a 3% or higher impact due to latent racism, then the cost of that racial ani­mus cer­tainly out­weighed any turnout gains he might have accu­mu­lated among minori­ties. When you con­sider that low­er­ing a candidate’s votes by two per­cent­age points low­ers his odds of win­ning by about 33%, then Obama cer­tainly has his work cut out for him in what’s shap­ing up to be a tough elec­toral bat­tle this year.

Per­haps I should amend that to say the only risk of con­flict is intra-​​party and not inter-​​party, espe­cially on the Repub­li­can side.
 

@drfunguy

I’d like to echo dc’s com­ment on how fas­ci­nat­ing the human micro­biome stuff is. I look for­ward to see­ing where they go next with that research.

The most con­tentious issue so far for the dems was whether or not to include “neg­a­tive” lan­guage in the state party state­ment of prin­ci­ples, to clar­ify recent Repub­li­can actions that the Democ­rats here gen­er­ally oppose. The “neg­a­tive” amend­ment was rejected.

@dc

Another exam­ple of acri­mony at the Repub­li­can con­ven­tion: dis­cus­sion on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in their plat­form devolved into a debate over rules that included shout­ing and accu­sa­tions of cheating.