19 July 2010 knee rehab

No cycling, no walking due to a day trip where I’ll be walking around.

But I did leg lifts, sit ups, crunches and other ab exercises and my PT stuff.

Progress (warm, after PT and a hot shower)

15 July: as straight as it went

19 July: straight

I am clearly touching a double CD case; the other side I can get too low to slide a single CD case under.

19 July: bent

I have a “heel’s worth” of inches to improve.

Shoulder: This advice seems to be helping.

Pearls Before Swine Last Sunday

Or click here if the above doesn’t show.

19 July 2010 (am)

We have a small day-trip planned for later in the day. So I’ll skip walking and just do PT exercises. I had better pack ice and Tylenol though.

Posts
Sarah Palin fun: enjoy her struggles with the English language via her twitter “tweets”.

What will happen in the 2010 midterm elections?

Republicans think that they will win and take control of both houses of Congress. Via Dick Morris:

Seven months ago, the conventional wisdom was that, while the Republicans would score impressive gains in both houses of Congress in the elections of 2010, the Democrats would keep control. Now, it is that the Republicans may, indeed, capture the House, but never the Senate. Presidential press secretary Robert Gibbs admitted that the loss of the House was a possibility.

The conventional wisdom is still wrong. The Republicans will take the Senate and the House.

The Democrats: they fell that we’ll keep control:

Nancy Pelosi:

In a new fundraising email from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Pelosi guarantees in no uncertain terms that Democrats will retain control of the House of Representatives.

“Here is what will happen in November. Democrats will keep control of the House. Period.”

Pelosi adds that she’s got a secret weapon up her sleeve to ensure triumph … you!

Joe Biden:

Vice President Joe Biden on Sunday said Democrats would defy predictions of major losses in the midterm elections, instead declaring that “we’re going to be in great shape” and predicting continued control of the House and Senate.

“I don’t think the losses are going to be bad at all. I think we’re going to shock the heck out of everybody,” Biden said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Biden pointed to a new Las Vegas Review-Journal poll that showed Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who is viewed as highly vulnerable, up seven points on GOP foe Sharron Angle.

“The reports of our demise are premature,” Biden said.

He said that Democrats must make the case for measures like the Wall Street overhaul that Obama will sign shortly, the new health care reform law and the economic stimulus package.

“It’s just going to take time. This is July. The election is not until November. And I think we’re going to have to firmly make our case,” Biden said. “Compared to the alternative, I think we’re going to get a fair amount of credit by November, and I think we’re going to do fine.”

Paul Krugman doesn’t predict but says that the problem is that the President didn’t pass a big enough stimulus to create jobs, though he admits that passing it might not have been possible. But he thinks that the President should have been seen as trying rather than as trying to compromise:

What political scientists, as opposed to pundits, tell us is that it really is the economy, stupid. Today, Ronald Reagan is often credited with godlike political skills — but in the summer of 1982, when the U.S. economy was performing badly, his approval rating was only 42 percent.

My Princeton colleague Larry Bartels sums it up as follows: “Objective economic conditions — not clever television ads, debate performances, or the other ephemera of day-to-day campaigning — are the single most important influence upon an incumbent president’s prospects for re-election.” If the economy is improving strongly in the months before an election, incumbents do well; if it’s stagnating or retrogressing, they do badly. [...]

The best way for Mr. Obama to have avoided an electoral setback this fall would have been enacting a stimulus that matched the scale of the economic crisis. Obviously, he didn’t do that. Maybe he couldn’t have passed an adequate-sized plan, but the fact is that he didn’t even try. True, senior economic officials reportedly downplayed the need for a really big effort, in effect overruling their staff; but it’s also clear that political advisers believed that a smaller package would get more friendly headlines, and that the administration would look better if it won its first big Congressional test.

In short, it looks as if the administration itself was taken in by the pundit delusion, focusing on how its policies would play in the news rather than on their actual impact on the economy.

Republicans, by the way, seem less susceptible to this delusion. Since Mr. Obama took office, they have engaged in relentless obstruction, obviously unworried about how their actions would look or be reported. And it’s working: by blocking Democratic efforts to alleviate the economy’s woes, the G.O.P. is helping its chances of a big victory in November.

What does Intrade say? Senate: 71.5-17.1 (bid prices, Democratic control versus Republican Control), House: 54.4-45.2 Republicans.

I haven’t done a detailed study to see how well Intrade has predicted such things this far out; Intrade has been accurate very close to election time though. Time to trust it: in mid October. But the “conventional wisdom” seems to be: R’s get the House, D’s (with Sanders and Lieberman) control the Senate. Ironically, a split Congress might actually help Obama get reelected in 2012.