11 May 2011 (AM)

Workout notes I walked with Lynn; we did about 1 hour together and I sped up to do 20 minutes on my own. Reason: the walk started off fine, but the slow pace eventually bothered my piriformis. So I needed to speed up to my usual, more comfortable pace. The discomfort went away. I note that I have a pressure point on the outside of my thigh that, when pressed, relieves the priformis sensation. So I wonder if I don’t have an IT band issue as well.

During the walk I saw rabbits and groundhogs and lots of geese; some had their fledglings with them.

Weights: yes, the shoulder is feeling much better. So I lifted:
incline bench: 10 x 115, 7 x 135, 7 x 135, 6 x 135
curls: dumbbell: 2 sets of 10 x 25 lbs, preacher: two sets of 10 x 66 (2 10′s on each size; EZ curl)
lat pull downs: 4 sets with cable handles (50 per arm x 10, then 3 sets of 60 per arm), 10 x 140 regular bar (shoulder friendly grip)
rows: medium grip: 10 x 200, 10 x 210, narrow grip: 10 x 230 (a bit of a struggle)
rotator cuff
hip hikes
stretches, back series.
sit ups: 35, 35, 30 (inclines 1, 2, 3, with 1 being the highest)
Then I did legs:
glute machine (2 sets of 90 lbs. per leg.

Hip abduction: 2 sets of 10 with 170

Hip adduction 2 sets of 10 with 185

Note: my left glute (the one with the trouble) is weaker than the right one. I’ll have to work on that.

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Immigration reform (El Paso, TX)

Republicans: who is going to lose to President Obama in the 2012 election?
Robert Reich says it will be Mitt Romney:

With Trump, Gingrich, Bachmann, and possibly Palin now in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, “GOP” is starting to mean Goofy, Outrageous, and Peculiar. Mitt would pose the most serious challenge to a second Obama term.

I say this not because Mitt’s mind is the sharpest of the likely contenders (Gingrich is far more nimble intellectually). Nor because his record of public service is particularly impressive (Tim Pawlenty took his governorship seriously while Mitt as governor seemed more intent on burnishing his Republican credentials outside Massachusetts). Nor because Mitt is the most experienced at running a business (Donald Trump has managed a giant company while Mitt made his money buying and selling companies.) Nor, finally, because he’s especially charismatic or entertaining (Sarah Palin can work up audiences and Mike Huckabee is genuinely funny and folksy, while Mitt delivers a speech so laboriously he seems to be driving a large truck).

Mitt Romney’s great strength is he looks, sounds, and acts presidential.

Policy wonks like me want to believe the public pays most attention to candidates’ platforms and policy positions. Again and again we’re proven wrong. Unless a candidate is way out of the mainstream (Barry Goldwater and George McGovern come to mind), the public tends to vote for the person who makes them feel safest at a visceral level, who reassures them he’ll take best care of the country – not because of what he says but because of how he says it.

Mr. Reich seems to think less of Mr. Romney than I do. On the other hand, he thinks more of his chances than I do. Go figure.
I still think it would be a mistake to count Mr. Pawlenty out, though he might end up with a VP slot instead.

But then again, I don’t know how the Republican primary voters will go.

Nate Silver comes up with a regression model (based on polling and name recognition):

And shows how past nominations would have been predicted via this model:

He then goes on to say:

The current Republican race is, by some margin, the most wide-open in the modern era on the G.O.P. side, but there are a couple of comparable examples if you look at the Democrats. The model would have had Scoop Jackson as the nominal favorite to win the Democratic nomination in 1976 — but still would have given him only a 20 percent chance. Michael Dukakis in 1988 (26 percent chance of winning) and John Kerry in 2004 (29 percent) were in the same range as Mr. Romney is now, though for different reasons — their polling wasn’t quite as strong as Mr. Romney’s, but they were doing it with considerably lower name recognition.

That brings me to the second point. What makes the 2012 Republican race unusual is not that there isn’t much of a frontrunner at this point — that’s happened before — but rather that both the high-recognition and low-recognition names are underwhelming.

On the one hand, while Mr. Romney’s numbers and Mike Huckabee’s are considerably better than Sarah Palin’s or Newt Gingrich’s, they both fail to crack 20 percent in the polling average despite very wide name recognition. Both are also polling lower now than at the end of the 2008 campaign, in which Mr. Romney ultimately wound up with 22 percent of the Republican primary vote and Mr. Huckabee 21 percent.

There is much more there (other models, methodology, etc.).