17 February 2011 (pm)

Workout II 4 x 25 sit ups, rotator cuff (shoulders felt great afterward), 5 mile treadmill walk. 14:20 first mile; then did some 600 m at 12 min/mile, 200 at 14:20 then a 11:50 mile, then some more 600 on, 200 off, 800 on. Total: 5 miles in 13:55.

Then more stretching.

Note to the ladies: if I am laying down to stretch and you walk right over my head (not stepping on me), I will check you out as you pass over my face. Really.

Posts
Republicans: are they really as crazy as they appear? Some are and:

An interesting exchange between John Quiggin and Jonathan Chait on right-wing agnotology — that is, culturally-induced ignorance or doubt. The specific issue is birtherism, the claim that Barack Obama was born in Kenya or anyway not in America, which polls indicate is a view held by a majority of Republican primary voters.

Quiggin suggests that right-wingers aren’t really birthers in their hearts; it’s just that affirming birtherism is a sort of badge of belonging, a shibboleth in the original biblical sense. Chait counters that much of the modern right lives in a mental universe in which liberal elites hide the truth, and in which they, through their access to Fox News etc., know things the brainwashed masses don’t.

My view is that Quiggin is right as far as right-wing politicians are concerned: for the most part they know that Obama was born here, that he isn’t a socialist,that there are no death panels, and so on, but feel compelled to pretend to be crazy as a career move. But I think Chait has it right on the broader movement.

Budget stuff The Republicans will not compromise; it isn’t in their political interests to do so. Dick Morris writes:

So what happens if the cuts proposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) prove unacceptable to the Senate and the president? What if there is no compromise? What if nobody gives in?

A budget deadlock, played out over months, will doom Obama and assure his defeat. But an easily won compromise will help him get re-elected.

The central question in Obama’s bid for a second term is: Will the issues that doomed his party in 2010 still be the key questions in 2012? If they are, we already know how the election will come out. If they are not, Obama can win.

When the president says he does not “want to re-fight the battles of the past two years,” he means that he embraces this reality. He doesn’t want Obamacare, high spending, huge deficits, cap and trade, card check and the like to be the items in discussion in the 2012 election.

But he has failed to put forward a compelling agenda for the next two years. That was the essential defect of his State of the Union speech — nobody is going to storm any barricades for high-speed rail and more R&D spending.

If the Republicans hold firm in demanding huge spending cuts and Obama does not give in, the question of whether or not to cut spending will dominate the nation’s political discourse for months on end and will spill over into the 2012 election.

To assure that it will, the Republicans should hold firm to their budget spending cuts without surrender or compromise. If necessary, it is OK to vote a few very short-term continuing resolutions to keep the government open for a few weeks at a time, always keeping on the pressure.

When the debt limit vote comes up, they should refuse to allow an increase without huge cuts in spending. If the debt-limit deadline passes, they should force the administration to scramble to cobble together enough money to operate for weeks at a time.

If Obama offers a half a loaf, the GOP should spurn it for weeks and months. Then, rather than actually shut down the government, let them accept some variant of their proposed cuts but only give in return a few more weeks’ time, at which point the issue will be re-litigated. Don’t go for Armageddon — just keep fighting the battle.

Can it be any clearer?

17 February 2011 am

Yoga class in the morning; I am going to have to do more of this on my own. I tend to have an “all the time” stiffness; when I stand after sitting I am tight, tight, tight.

Economics Robert Reich explains what is going on with Social Security:

In a former life I was a trustee of the Social Security trust fund. So let me set the record straight.

Social Security isn’t responsible for the federal deficit. Just the opposite. Until last year Social Security took in more payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits. It lent the surpluses to the rest of the government.

Now that Social Security has started to pay out more than it takes in, Social Security can simply collect what the rest of the government owes it. This will keep it fully solvent for the next 26 years.

But why should there even be a problem 26 years from now? Back in 1983, Alan Greenspan’s Social Security commission was supposed to have fixed the system for good – by gradually increasing payroll taxes and raising the retirement age. (Early boomers like me can start collecting full benefits at age 66; late boomers born after 1960 will have to wait until they’re 67.)

Greenspan’s commission must have failed to predict something. But what? It fairly accurately predicted how quickly the boomers would age. It had a pretty good idea of how fast the US economy would grow. While it underestimated how many immigrants would be coming into the United States, that’s no problem. To the contrary, most new immigrants are young and their payroll-tax contributions will far exceed what they draw from Social Security for decades.

So what did Greenspan’s commission fail to see coming?

Inequality.

Remember, the Social Security payroll tax applies only to earnings up to a certain ceiling. (That ceiling is now $106,800.) The ceiling rises every year according to a formula roughly matching inflation.

Back in 1983, the ceiling was set so the Social Security payroll tax would hit 90 percent of all wages covered by Social Security. That 90 percent figure was built into the Greenspan Commission’s fixes. The Commission assumed that, as the ceiling rose with inflation, the Social Security payroll tax would continue to hit 90 percent of total income.

Today, though, the Social Security payroll tax hits only about 84 percent of total income.

Raise the cap. Period.

Budget Here is a look at the budget spin:

Democrats and Republicans disagree strongly about elements of President Obama’s 2012 budget, but they are alike in one respect: Both sides are misrepresenting important facts.

* Obama claimed that by the middle of this decade his budget “will not be adding more to the national debt.” But that’s not true. The debt will continue to grow by more than $600 billion even in 2015, the year with the least red ink projected.
* The president also claims that the “discretionary” budget is only 12 percent of the total. It’s actually 36 percent. Obama, like President Bush before him, is referring to “non-security” spending that excludes not only the Pentagon but the Department of Homeland Security and veterans’ benefits.
* Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the Budget Committee, repeated a false claim that Obama has increased domestic discretionary spending by 84 percent over the last two years. He hasn’t. That spending went up 27 percent, even counting stimulus spending, according to the official tally from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
* Ryan’s committee also claims that Obama’s budget contains $1.6 trillion in “new taxes.” Actually, 44 percent of that total is made up of increases scheduled under current law, not proposed in the budget. And one big proposed increase is offset by Obama holding down a scheduled rise in the Alternative Minimum Tax.

Note: later in the article, it explained that the President was not counting payments toward paying down the national debt but rather just spending on other items.

More Republicans
The Republicans won’t take on their lunatic base. Why? Easy: they don’t win without their loons.

Internet
Don’t get a group of hackers angry with you, especially if you are a computer security company:

Today, the website ArsTechnica ran a piece that details how Anonymous methodically went after HBGary Federal’s digital infrastructure. Earlier this month, HBGary Federal’s CEO Aaron Barr said the company, which specializes in analyzing vulnerabilities in computer security for companies and even some government agencies, had undertaken an investigation of Anonymous and had used social media to unmask the group’s most important people.

The Financial Times reported:

Of a few hundred participants in operations, only about 30 are steadily active, with 10 people who “are the most senior and co-ordinate and manage most of the decisions,” Mr. Barr told the Financial Times. That team works together in private internet relay chat sessions, through e-mail and in Facebook groups. Mr Barr said he had collected information on the core leaders, including many of their real names, and that they could be arrested if law enforcement had the same data.

Barr said an HBGary representative was set to give a presentation at a security conference in San Francisco, but as soon as Anonymous got wind of their plans, it hacked into HBGary’s servers, rifled through their e-mails and published them to the web. The group defaced HBGary’s website and published the user registration database of another site owned by Greg Hoglund, owner of HBGary.

Amazingly, reports ArsTechnica, Anonymous managed all this by exploiting easy and everyday security flaws. First, it found that the content management system — a program that allows for easy publishing to the web — had a security vulnerability. The group was able to get into the usernames and passwords from the database and, as ArsTechnica puts it, HBGary employees did not follow Internet best practices and used the same passwords over and over on different sites including their e-mail accounts, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.

Religion and Woo

Jon Stewart on Glenn Beck (satire)

Credit where Credit is Due

Some in the tea-party caucus did the right thing:

In a sign that some freshman Republicans were willing to cut military spending, the House voted 233-198 on Wednesday to cancel an alternate fighter jet engine that the Bush and Obama administrations had tried to kill for the last five years.

The vote marked another instance in which some of the new legislators, including members of the Tea Party, broke ranks with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, a Republican from Ohio, where the engine provided more than 1,000 jobs.

Many of the 87 freshman Republicans in the House had initially been hesitant to trim military spending as part of their drive to reduce the budget deficit.

But after forcing Mr. Boehner and other Republican leaders to propose greater cuts in domestic programs, the freshmen agreed last week to include $16 billion in military cuts in this year’s spending bill. [...]

Overconfidence FAIL – Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures

epic fail video – Overconfidence FAIL

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See the whole fight here (don’t blink)

A game-winning 4-point play, complete with midcourt buzzer beater – Prep Rally – High School – Yahoo! Sports

Comprehensive High School news, scores, standings, fantasy games, rumors, and more

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Xtranormal | One Professor’s Fantasy

16 February 2011

Workout notes embarrassingly slow treadmill “run” (45 minutes to go a bit more than 4 miles), 1 mile walk, hip hikes, stretching…the idea is to get my knees to bend.

The run: I never got out of breath and I did up it a bit 20 minutes into it; I varied the incline on my manual treadmill. It was 32 F (0 C) outside and there was still quite a bit of snow melt on the road.

I am not sore but I have an almost permanent stiffness to my body that I’ll have to address. Do I need more yoga?

Posts The feed title of this Paul Krugman post is “just because you wrote a report doesn’t mean that you did anything“. Basically it calls the whole Simpson-Bowles report a “giant asterisk”.

Krugman also has this little gem which points out that it is sloppy thinking to talk about “entitlements”; social security is NOT on a par with Medicare:

And President Obama, I’m glad to see, knows that:

The truth is Social Security is not the huge contributor to the deficit that the other two entitlements are. I’m confident we can get Social Security done in the same way that Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill were able to get it done, by parties coming together, making some modest adjustments. I think we can avoid slashing benefits, and I think we can make it stable and stronger for not only this generation but for the next generation.

It’s also important to realize that the conceptual issues are very different for Social Security than they are for M&M. For SS, we decide the level of benefits; for M&M, we can’t do that, because health costs for any individual are unpredictable; so cost-savings on the health-care programs essentially involve deciding what we’ll pay for rather than how much we’ll pay. (Death panels!)

15 February 2011: Kooks, Woos and Morons….and other topics…

Ok, we’ll start with some cool but non-kooky stuff
Science
Our Sun just let loose a huge solar flare. No, this doesn’t mean that we are all going to die (not all at once anyway ) but it does mean that people that live in northern latitudes will enjoy a spectacular light show and that we might get an electro-magnetic storm.

Relativity and Quantum Mechanics Both of these are advanced concepts and to learn about either at the professional level takes talent, skill and effort. But on some level, quantum mechanics is harder:

“Hardness” is not a property that inheres in a theory itself; it’s a statement about the relationship between the theory and the human beings trying to understand it. Quantum mechanics and relativity both seem hard because they feature phenomena that are outside the everyday understanding we grow up with. But for relativity, it’s really just a matter of re-arranging the concepts we already have. Space and time merge into spacetime; clocks behave a bit differently; a rigid background becomes able to move and breathe. Deep, certainly; inscrutable, no.

In the case of quantum mechanics, the sticky step is the measurement process. Unlike in other theories, in quantum mechanics “what we measure” is not the same as “what exists.” This is the source of all the problems (not that recognizing this makes them go away). Our brains have a very tough time separating what we see from what is real; so we keep on talking about the position of the electron, even though quantum mechanics keeps trying to tell us that there’s no such thing.

Economics
A scientist weighs in on the President’s proposed budget. It really isn’t that bad for science; not that the Republicans won’t try to gut science funding.

Yes, things like medicare are part of the real budget busters. And yes, some say that we ought to means-test. That isn’t a bad thing…but it won’t save us much money at all:

But while there’s some money to be gotten by taxing the top 2 percent — they have more than 20 percent of the income — they account for roughly their pro-rata share of benefit costs — that is, the richest 2 percent account for around 2 percent of Medicare expenses. (Maybe a bit less because they’re healthier than the average American, maybe a bit more because they live longer.) Social Security is more complicated, but bear in mind that high earners get bigger benefits, but also get taxed on those benefits; so again, we’re talking about savings not very different from their share of the population.

So we’re talking very small savings here. This is more anti-Wille Suttonism, going where the money isn’t.

Woo and Nonsense
It is the 10′th anniversary of Fox News airing the “did we really walk on the moon” episode. Yes, I’ve met such people; two of my high school English teachers fell into that camp.

Yes, we should be intolerant of such nonsense:

ohn Beddington, Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK government, has had enough and isn’t going to take it any more. He’s urging a more vigorous response to the creeping woo.

“We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of racism. We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of people who [are] anti-homosexuality… We are not—and I genuinely think we should think about how we do this—grossly intolerant of pseudo-science, the building up of what purports to be science by the cherry-picking of the facts and the failure to use scientific evidence and the failure to use scientific method.”

“One way is to be completely intolerant of this nonsense,” he said. “That we don’t kind of shrug it off. We don’t say: ‘oh, it’s the media’ or ‘oh they would say that wouldn’t they?’ I think we really need, as a scientific community—and this is a very important scientific community—to think about how we do it.”

[...]

That is what we need: more activist scientists who point out the stupidity of our opposition. I know, Beddington will be taken to task by mealy-mouthed well-meaning apologists who’ll declare that direct conflict is bad and won’t persuade anyone, but I have to disagree — the constant backing off and making apologies for nonsense is what creates an environment in which lies can grow.

For a beautiful example, look at this article on the Huffington Post, AOL, and anti-vaccination movements. The HuffPo is still making excuses for defending the possibility of a vaccination/autism link, and is saying that the denialists have a reasonable position. Why, no they don’t: you might as well be arguing for a link between autism and anal probes by Martians in flying saucers.[...]

Yes, the peddlers of such woo are often people who vote the same way that I do.

And no, the “gnu atheists” don’t have to be nicer, no matter what some “nice” atheists say, including ones who have written good books:

So you can imagine my disappointment at reading this asinine essay over at HuffPo. It’s a poor representative of a tiresome genre: An atheist lectures his flock about the proper way to discuss religion. Here’s the opening:

I’ve been studying atheists, agnostics, XTC fans, and various other types of secular folk out there for quite some time. I’ve also read most of the anti-religious books that have been published ever since Sam Harris kicked things off with The End of Faith.

And I must say, I’ve got a few criticisms for my God-denying brothers and sisters out there.

Or perhaps, more specifically, some pointers.

For if you really think that a secular worldview is superior to — or at least more rational than — a religious one, and if you really think that the world would be a better place if people didn’t believe in supernatural deities, nasty demons, or chubby cherubs, I would suggest a little self-examination. A lot of you out there are making some serious mistakes.

With that opening I would assume that atheists, through their serious mistakes, have achieved a level of irrationality commensurate with a belief in demons and cherubs. That seems implausible, but let’s see what Zuckerman has in mind.

1. Insisting that science can, or will, answer everything. When Bill O’Reilly or your Baptist in-laws ask you pointed questions like: “How did the universe get here?” or “What caused the Big Bang?” or “Why is there something instead of nothing?” don’t insist that science has the answer. It may not — ever. It is far better to simply say that we don’t know everything, and may in fact never know everything. There will always be some mysteries out there. Just say: “Yeah — it is quite a profound puzzle. No one knows the answer. But just because we don’t know the answers to everything, doesn’t mean we then automatically accept some made-up possibility.”

Are there atheists out there who don’t answer that way? I am not aware of anyone who claims that science will someday answer every existential mystery. With regard to ultimate questions the point is simply that there is no reason to believe that theology can solve any mysteries that science cannot.

There are several more points to be made; check them out. But he is so right on this one. Anytime one challenges a superstition (faith healing, homeopathy, etc.) you ALWAYS get the “science doesn’t know everything” canard. Yes, it doesn’t, But that doesn’t mean that woo or superstition or religion can answer ANYTHING!!!!! Science has delivered correct answers and the other stuff: not at all.

Republican Morons
Maybe your state employees want to form a union. You as a governor, thinks that they shouldn’t be able to. If they resist….call out the National Guard….if you are a Republican. Remember the time when the National Guard helped people?

Walker is facing fierce criticism for this all-out assault against state workers, especially after he insisted that the “National Guard” will be used against a walkout:

When asked by a reporter what will happen if workers resist, Walker replied that he would call out the National Guard. He said that the National Guard is “prepared…for whatever the governor, their commander-in-chief, might call for. … I am fully prepared for whatever may happen.”

Traditionally, the National Guard is called to assist Americans in times of crisis; so Walker’s attempt to use the National Guard as a tool to suppress dissent is particularly deplorable. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, more than 50,000 Guard members were called to help, and following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, more than 50,000 Guards were deployed. Veterans have strongly objected to Walker’s recent intent to use the National Guard as a vessel to intimidate state workers. VoteVet released a statement today that says Walker shouldn’t use the National Guard as an “intimidation force“:

“Maybe the new governor doesn’t understand yet – but the National Guard is not his own personal intimidation force to be mobilized to quash political dissent,” said Robin Eckstein, a former Wisconsin National Guard member, Iraq War Veteran from Appleton, WI, and member of VoteVets.org. “The Guard is to be used in case of true emergencies and disasters, to help the people of Wisconsin, not to bully political opponents. Considering many veterans and Guard members are union members, it’s even more inappropriate to use the Guard in this way. This is a very dangerous line the Governor is about to cross.”

I don’t know; perhaps he’ll attempt to use the national guard to do the employee jobs?

Kooky State Lawmakers
South Dakota: bill introduced that would allow people to use “defense of life” as a reason for killing abortion providers.

Yes, the bill has been amended but the problem of “self defense of the fetus” remains problematic: why does a pregnant woman have MORE self defense rights than a non-pregnant one? Remember, this isn’t simply a matter of adding an extra count of murder to those who kill pregnant women; if the legislature wanted to do that, they could have introduced a new bill. The question remains as to why they just didn’t kill this original noxious bill.

Not white? This Republican lawmaker thinks that you probably not a real American:

One week ago, the Kansas House Federal and State Committee held a hearing about in-state tuition being granted to the children of undocumented immigrants, which has been the policy in the state since 2004.

Speaking in favor of repealing the law, Rep. Connie O’Brien (R-KS) began telling an anecdote at the hearing about how her son had difficulty in getting financial assistance to attend college. She explained that she took her son to a financial aid office, and as she was waiting in line, she believed there was a girl waiting in line with them who was “not originally from this country.” Fellow committee member Rep. Sean Gatewood (D-KS) asked O’Brien how she knew this student was “illegal.” O’Brien replied that she knew because the student “wasn’t black, she wasn’t Asian, and she had the olive complexion”:

REP. O’BRIEN: My son who’s a Kansas resident, born here, raised here, didn’t qualify for any financial aid. Yet this girl was going to get financial aid. My son was kinda upset about it because he works and pays for his own schooling and his books and everything and he didn’t think that was fair. We didn’t ask the girl what nationality she was, we didn’t think that was proper. But we could tell by looking at her that she was not originally from this country. [...]

REP. GATEWOOD: Can you expand on how you could tell that they were illegal?

REP. O’BRIEN: Well she wasn’t black, she wasn’t Asian, and she had the olive complexion.

She is catching heat for this, and should. But the larger issue is that this is EXACTLY how many Americans think, and people who think this way tend to vote Republican. To them, their little society is the “real America” and everyone else are not real Americans. Don’t think that the Republican politicians fail to take advantage of this.

As long as mainstream Republicans fail to denounce things like this, the GOP will be seen as the party that coddles xenophobic, racist assholes.

Note: I do NOT accuse Republicans such as President Bush and Senator McCain of being this way; they are pretty good in this area.

15 February 2011

Workout Yoga (half hearted effort), then weights and 4 miles of walking on the track.
Details: I went with Lynn to the Riverplex for yoga; she had to leave right after (mammogram, which was ok)
Weights (at Bradley): sit ups (4 x 25)
rotator cuff
rows: 10 x 180, 10 x 200, 10 x 200
curls (15 barbell, 15 x 20 lb. dumbbell, 10 x 25 dumbbell)
pull downs (10 x 120, 10 x 120, 15 x 100)
incline presses: 3 sets of 10 x 115 (touch the chest all but the first rep of the first set)
squats: Smith: 10 x 45, 10 x 135, 7 x 185 (more shallow on the 185)
free: 10 x 135 (felt easy)
4 miles of walking; 2 miles in 26:30, last 2 in 25:02; 12:17 last mile.
Hip hikes,
hamstring with the ball (3 sets of 10)

Note: I am going to have to be very deliberate if I am to regain ALL of my motion in my right leg; it still won’t straighten nor bend fully.
I have to be diligent and patient; perhaps 10-15 minutes every day. These are boring but I have to them if I want full range of motion.

Note: the knee still gets a bit hot…not real hot but still warm. There is still some healing going on.

Politics
I see Mitt Romney as the front runner for the GOP nomination; if someone put a gun to my head and said “A Republican WILL win in 2012; YOU get to pick the one”, I’d probably pick him. Don’t get me wrong; I am not going to vote for him in the general election. But I see him as smart and competent.

Nevertheless, he has some honesty issues. As far as his background: if he were to say “hey, Massachusetts is a blue state and so I governed accordingly; the US is more conservative (on the whole) and I’d adjust”, I’d get it. But I don’t see him saying that directly.

And I see him, well, lying:

Later, Romney sought to put the job loss under Obama in historical context, but came down on the wrong side of history:

Romney, Feb. 11: President Barack Obama has stood watch over the greatest job loss in modern American history. And that, my friends, is one inconvenient truth that will haunt this president throughout history.

We dealt with a similar claim when Karen Hughes, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, compared her former boss with Obama during a Jan. 23 appearance on “Meet the Press.” What we found is that during the recent recession, there were more jobs lost under Bush than Obama.

As we wrote in January, BLS statistics show that “total nonfarm employment (the standard measure of jobs) declined by nearly 8.4 million between its most recent peak in December 2007 and when the job slump bottomed out two years later, in December 2009. Of those lost jobs, 4.4 million disappeared while Bush was president, and just under 4 million vanished during Obama’s first year.” Now, the Bush total includes the devastating loss of 779,000 jobs in January 2009 — Bush’s last month in office and Obama’s first. We included January 2009 in the Bush column since Obama did not become president until Jan. 20, 2009.

Yes, I brought this up earlier.

More politics
See this lady?

Well, now some right wingers are attacking her for…..being fat???

First Lady Michelle Obama is in the midst of a nationwide anti-obesity campaign aimed at shrinking America’s collectively expanding waistline. The conservative media are striking back against Mrs. Obama’s message of fitness and nutrition by decrying what they see as government intrusion into our pantries.

At least, that’s what they’re doing when they’re not calling Michelle Obama fat.

Rush Limbaugh’s long been laying the groundwork for this sexist attack, using stories about the First Lady’s nutrition programs to call the fitness-fanatic Mrs. Obama “Michelle, My Butt.” (The jab’s lack of sense it exceeded only by its lack of self-awareness.)

Yesterday, the resident cartoonists at Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com posted this offering:

Okkkkaaaaayyyy……

So, I’ll help the Republicans out here with a modest suggestion: let these two fellows; Gov. Christie and Mr. Limbaugh, lead the charge in this attack:

14 February 2011 pm

Click for a larger version

If this seems like an exaggeration, this is a Republican presidential candidate.

Now the Republicans might have some reason to worry in that there is reason to believe that their current crop of candidates is weak. Then again, people thought that about the Democrats in 1991.

Of course, Christine O’Donnell isn’t a candidate for anything, but she is billing herself as President Obama’s chief political rival of 2010:

WASHINGTON – Former Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell of Delaware is claiming in a fundraising letter that she was the White House’s top opponent in the 2010 election.

O’Donnell, who lost badly in her third consecutive Senate bid last year and is being investigated for potential spending violations during the campaign, is raising money for a new political action committee she formed recently to spread her message. In her letter, sent to supporters Tuesday, she said her tea party-backed campaign forced the White House to put resources into Delaware last year, including visits by President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.

“You are the reason that President Obama came to Delaware in late 2010, diverting his attention from other states he could have campaigned in,” the letter says. “You are the reason that a frantic White House dispatched Vice President Joe Biden, again and again, to campaign in Delaware to defeat me, who they regarded as their number one opponent.”

O’Donnell pulled off a stunning upset in the GOP primary, but her campaign was later plagued by revelations about her unconventional past, including a thin employment record, contested campaign finance spending, and previous statements about opposing masturbation and dabbling in witchcraft as a teenager.

She trailed badly in the polls throughout the general election, eventually losing by 17 points to Democrat Chris Coons.

With tight races across the country, neither party invested heavily in the Delaware contest, and Obama devoted much more time to states with competitive races such as Ohio and Pennsylvania. While Obama visited Delaware once, many suspected the stop was aimed more at trying to link O’Donnell’s troubles to other Republicans than at protecting the longtime Democratic seat.