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Most of the midterm models expect Republicans to pick up 52 seats:

Chris Cillizza notes that the Republicans’ chances of taking the Senate have improved. But Jonathan Bernstein focuses instead on the diminishing likelihood of a Republican blowout:

Granted, pickups in Iowa and Colorado would be a nice way to put Republicans over the top. But at least so far, they haven’t managed to add potential targets such as Minnesota, Michigan or Virginia to the list of closely contested states, and they remain unlikely to win New Hampshire or North Carolina. The result is that prediction models are converging at 52 Republican seats, not 54 or more.

I’m not playing that down. No matter what the opportunities, I doubt there has been a single point during this election cycle when Republican strategists would not have been satisfied with winning seven seats to reach 52. And just as Democratic hopes to hold a majority are still realistic, so are Republican dreams of an even larger landslide. Still, what’s happening is consistent with Republicans taking advantage of expected opportunities.

Greg Sargent maintains that “Democrats do still have paths to retaining control. But they are increasingly narrow”:

Put it this way: Republicans are favored to take the Senate. If they do, it wouldn’t be at all surprising. On the other hand, if Democrats somehow hold on, that outcome wouldn’t be all that shocking, either. But a lot has to go right for Democrats for that to happen.

Charlie Cook is keeping tabs on the Kansas and Georgia races:

The prospects remain very tough for Democrats to hold onto their majority in the Senate, but there is a new scenario emerging—albeit still unlikely—that is turning the majority math a bit on its head.

As I have said previously, Republicans need a net gain of six seats to take the majority. The question has generally been whether Republicans just need to knock off six Democratic seats to get to 51, or if they will need to gross seven seats in order to net six. Now there appears to be a real question as to whether Republicans may need to gross eight seats in order to net six, covering for the potential loss of not just Sen. Pat Roberts in Kansas but an open seat in Georgia as well.

If you want to watch a bunch of realistic looking fake people run into a slowly spinning metal bar (and you really should want to watch it), this is the video for you:

It's better bigger or with sound. (via waxy)

Tags: video

Now that Yosemite is out, with iOS 8 running on your iPhone, you can send and receive phone calls from your Mac and your iPad (also running iOS 8). This is one of the features of Continuity, which further integrates and connects your Mac and iOS devices. Continuity also includes Handoff, Instant Hotspot, AirDrop and SMS Relay (as part of the iOS 8.1 update).

Sending and receiving phone calls from the Mac and iPad is a benefit because sometimes when your iPhone rings it’s not where you are, but instead you are on your Mac or iPad. Now you can pick up the phone call directly from the Mac or iPad and don’t have to worry about stopping what you are doing to rush and find the phone. In this how-to article I will discuss how to set up and disable Phone Relay, how to send and receive iPhone Cellular Calls.

In order for iPhone Cellular Calls to work all of your devices have to be on the same Wi-Fi Network, running iOS 8, and signed into the same iCloud account. For example if you are an Apple family and have multiple iPhones, by being logged into the same iCloud account, this does cause a lot of confusion of having everyone’s device ring when the call is meant for a specific person. If the whole family is using the same iCloud account it is a good idea to change the iCloud account to avoid confusion.

To make sure iPhone Cellular Calls are set up you are going to open up FaceTime on the Mac. Then open Preferences by clicking on the word FaceTime in upper right hand corner and selecting Preferences.

When you open up Preferences, down at the bottom you want to make sure that iPhone Cellular Calls is checked on. If you do not want to send and receive calls from your Mac this is where you would uncheck it to turn it off. You do also have the option to choose where you want your phone call to be sent from either through your email address or your phone number, as this is what will be displayed when you call someone who doesn’t have you as a contact.

 

Now let’s check to make sure that iPhone Cellular Calls are set up on your iOS device. To do so, open up Settings and scroll down until you see FaceTime. You want to make sure that iPhone Cellular Calls is turned on.

This is where your Settings matter. For example if you keep iPhone Cellular Calls turned on your iPhone and Mac but off for your iPad, the call will ring on your iPhone and Mac. On the other hand, if you turn off iPhone Cellular Calls on your iPhone, but leave it on your Mac and on the iPad, only the iPhone will ring.

Now that iPhone Cellular Calls is set up, let’s discuss how it works. First we will discuss how to send calls.

On your Mac, you have two different ways to send calls. The first method involves using the FaceTime app to make phone calls. With FaceTime you are able to look up people in your Contacts by entering in a name, email or phone number. Or if the person you want to call is not in Contacts, you are able to type in the number and click on the white phone icon to call using the iPhone.

The second method to make phone calls from your Mac, involves sending calls from apps such as Calendar, Contacts and Safari. If you have phone numbers in your Calendar, you can click on the phone number to call it. In Contacts you will find the person you want to call. You can either press on the blue icon of the phone all the way to the right of the phone number, or do a right-click on the phone number and click Call “555-123-4567″ Using iPhone. With Safari when you highlight part of the phone number, a box appears with a small arrow to the right of it. Clicking on it will give you the option to call the number using the iPhone. Note this will also work for alpha-numeric numbers such as 1-800-APL-CARE.

Making phone calls on the iPad works exactly the same way as they do on the iPhone. You are able to tap on the number in Contacts or in Safari to place the call. However, if the number is not in your Contacts or if you cannot tap on it on Safari you cannot make the call.

Now that we discussed how to send calls, let’s discuss how to receive calls. When you receive a phone call on the Mac and iPad, just like the iPhone, you will see the caller’s name, number and picture if you added it.

When you receive a phone call on your Mac, your Mac will ring and a notification appears in the upper right hand corner of your computer screen.

Clicking on Accept in green answers the phone call and you are able to hear the conversation come out of your computer’s speaker system.

If you weren’t able to answer the phone because you were busy, pressing on the arrow next to the word Decline, brings up options to Reply with Message, or it can set a reminder for you to call the person back in 5 minutes, 15 minutes, or from an hour when the person called. When you do any of those options, it stops the phone from ringing and the caller immediately gets your voice mail. If you were totally unavailable and completely missed the call a missed notification appears in the upper right hand corner of the screen.

Receiving phone calls on an iPad works the same way as receiving phone calls on an iPhone. You slide across to answer, have the options to either respond with a text message or set a reminder reminding you to call the person back in an hour. Also you receive a missed notification on the lock screen.

While on a phone call on either your Mac or iPad you can switch the phone call to go to your iPhone. You might need to do this on occasions when you need to run out, but still want to be on the phone call. To switch from your Mac or iPad to the iPhone your phone needs to be awake. You will see a green bar up at the top of the screen, that flashes with the words in white Touch to return to call. Tapping on that will switch the call to your iPhone. It works very seamlessly and the caller does not even notice any difference in the quality of the sound of the call.

This is how you send and receive phone calls from your Mac and iPad. Let us know if you find it beneficial being able to send and receive phone calls from your Mac and iPad.

 

 

Filed under: How-To, iOS, Mac Tagged: Continuity, how to, icloud, iOS 8, iPad, iPhone, iPhone Cellular Calls, IPod Touch, Mac, os x yosemite, Phone calls, Phone relay, yosemite

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Atul Gawande's best selling Being Mortal is getting the Frontline treatment on PBS this January. Here's the trailer:

Tags: Atul Gawande   Being Mortal   books   death   medicine   TV

Neil Cummins has a new paper of interest, the abstract is this:

I analyze the age at death of 121,524 European nobles from 800 to 1800. Longevity began increasing long before 1800 and the Industrial Revolution, with marked increases around 1400 and again around 1650. Declines in violence contributed to some of this increase, but the majority must reflect other changes in individual behavior. The areas of North-West Europe which later witnessed the Industrial Revolution achieved greater longevity than the rest of Europe even by 1000 AD. The data suggest that the ‘Rise of the West’ originates before the Black Death.

For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.

Poland beat Germany for the first time ever, 2-0, in a European Championship qualifier in Warsaw.

Here’s what the nutters would like to be taught in history books regarding our nation’s history of slavery:

I’ve spoken with some history professors with very impressive credentials who told me this new framework doesn’t surprise them and is aligned with the content of college level history courses that downplay our noble history and accentuate the negative view. As an example, I note our slavery history. Yes, we practiced slavery. But we also ended it voluntarily, at great sacrifice, while the practice continues in many countries still today! Shouldn’t our students be provided that viewpoint? This is part of the argument that America is exceptional. Does our APUSH Framework support or denigrate that position?

We’ll just airbrush out the Civil War and the last 150 years of structural racism.

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By Anna Gauldin Democrats attempting to maintain control of the Senate are on the offensive with ads attacking Republican candidates for their records on women's rights.

Alex:  What is the question that evokes the answer:  “A cartoon with a watermelon punchline referencing the President of the United States.”

We reply in chorus: “What was the racist garbage in the Boston Herald today?”

Again, this has been picked up in the comments, but it’s been making me crazy for a couple of reasons.  For the obvious one, I’m just going to outsource to Charles Pierce, who knows the Herald very well indeed:

 Let’s move along down my personal resume to The Boston Herald, where the current editors, whom I know well, today made me ashamed ever to have set foot in the place, let alone worked there for six years. They ran an editorial cartoon by someone named Jerry Holbert. In the cartoon…the White House intruder is in the bathtub while the president is brushing his teeth. The caption reads: “White House Invader Got Farther Than Originally Thought.” This is what the cartoonist, Holbert, has the intruder saying from the tub.

“Have you tried the new watermelon-flavored toothpaste?”

Pierce notes the hollow contempt for those of us disgusted by this in the non-apology that followed our outcry, the assertion that there’s not a racist bone in Holbert’s body, that he was just referencing his own kids toothpaste, and that, wait for it….

…we didn’t mean to offend anyone.  Take it away, Charles:

Of course, it was not meant to offend anyone. That was just a bonus. What it was meant to do was to appeal to the base prejudices of the elderly white suburban demographic to which the Herald has been pitching itself for three decades. It is racist hooey pitched to fans of racist hooey. Period. And, like so many other things, it is different with this president. It is different because there are no rules.

I got the remnants of my day job to get back to, so I’m just going to touch on the most clueless bit of attempted contrarian justification for this bit of garbage, this, coming from Jonathan Chait:

I don’t think the joke hinges upon black people liking watermelon. I think the joke is about the Secret Service’s security failures. Obama himself is not even the subject of the joke — his perspective is that of, or close to, the reader’s. The point of the joke is that White House security is so lax that a random person could wander into the president’s living quarters undetected and take a bath, and regard this as so casual he could chat about a commonplace topic as toothpaste.

Glad that’s clear.

Black people liking watermelon is certainly not the main comic premise of the cartoon

Well, that’s alright then, dear, isn’t it?

and was probably not intended as a secondary premise, either.

And you know this, how? Because you’ve peered deeply into Holbart’s eyes?  You’ve seen into his soul?  You know him to be a good man?

The cartoonist, Jerry Holbert, explained that he came up with watermelon because he was thinking of his kids’ Colgate watermelon-flavor toothpaste.

My kids. Yeah. That’s it!

Possibly he made a subconscious connection between a black president and watermelon.

Because, of course that’s what anyone would do when contemplating the first African American president.

But it seems very doubtful this was his intent.

“Seems?”

“Seems!”

“Seems…”

Two things:  1 — when an experienced reporter falls back on “seems” you know they got nuthin.  They’re telling you what the wish to be true, not what they know, or necessarily even think is likely.

and 2:  Chait should know better, but has tangled himself up around race before, so may not:   racism, like sexism, or anti-Semitism or any form of bigotry and dehumanization of the other, is not about what is in someone’s heart.  It’s not a question of essence, of identity, of who someone is.  It’s all about what one does and says.  Action in the world defines both the sin and the good deed.

In this world, as opposed into that swelling in Chait’s spotless mind’s eye, Holbert used one of the oldest caricturers with which slave-holders benefiting from stolen lives and labor sought to limn African Americans as simple, lazy and unoppressed by their oppression.  It’s an explicitly racist trope, and everyone who’s reached the age of reason (Holbert is my age to the year) knows it.

Holbert may be certain that he has not one prejudiced bone in his body, but what he or Chait thinks about intent or the “real” import of this cartoon is utterly irrelevant.

The cartoon speaks for itself, and its creator, and its defenders…to the shame I fear they will not feel.

 

J. M. W. Turner “Slave-ship”  1840

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Spot your favorite underwater scenes in cinema:

Crooked Stave’s three-year-old Cellar Reserve program, a membership program seen as groundbreaking for Colorado craft brewers, is ending soon.

Much like the U.S. Senate race in Colorado, abortion became the focal point in the race for governor after the Republican candidate took a contentious stance on a popular birth control method.

Republicans and libertarians claim to hate big government, but they actually love it when it is in your uterus:

A new Alabama regulation, the most radical parental consent law in the country, puts minors seeking abortions virtually on trial, appoints a guardian for their fetus, and could drag family, friends, and acquaintances into court. The law, currently under challenge by the ACLU, went into effect on July 1. It allows the court to appoint the embryo or fetus a “guardian ad litem,” which is a person, usually a lawyer, tasked with advocating for the embryo’s interests in court. It also requires that the district attorney appear to represent the interests of the state — which the law explicitly says are “to protect unborn life.” And the DA can call the young woman’s friends, family members, teachers or employers as witnesses if he deems it necessary.

Are all DA’s referred to as “he,” even if they are female? Serious question.

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Gedion Zelalem 1, Galatasaray 0.

His name is Gedion Zelalem. He plays for Arsenal. And he is the destroyer of anyone he plays, in this case Galatasaray.

But you already knew that. Most every American soccer fan knows his name because they desperately want him to play for the U.S. Born in Germany, Zelalem moved to the U.S. as a kid, but doesn't have American citizenship. Yet. He reportedly is very close to getting it, thus enabling him to play for the U.S.

And the U.S. wants him. Why wouldn't you want a kid who is dribbling through other teams and starring for Arsenal? Sure, it's the U-19s, but it's no joke. Arsenal have one of the better youth teams in England and Zelalem is legitimate star on it.

Watch that video again.

And again.

And again.

Now try to say, with a straight face, that you don't want to see Zelalem in red, white and blue. Goddamn that video, he's so good.

The popular Weather Underground app has been updated with support for iOS 8’s widgets that sports a lot more data than most weather widgets will give you. The new at-a-glance view in the Notification Center provides a look at current radar images and current weather conditions.

You can grab the free Weather Underground app from the iOS App Store. For even more iOS 8 widgets, check out our recent round-ups of general-purpose and weather-specific widgets, and more.

Filed under: Apps Tagged: iOS 8, update, weather underground, widget

Check out 9to5Mac for more breaking coverage of Apps, update, and iOS 8.

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Lansing, Michigan, 9.30 am

Carol Leonnig has a piece in the Washington Post today about a botched Secret Service response to a 2011 shooting at the White House:

The suspect was able to park his car on a public street, take several shots and then speed off without being detected. It was sheer luck that the shooter was identified, the result of Ortega, a troubled and jobless 21-year-old, wrecking his car seven blocks away and leaving his gun inside.

The response infuriated the president and the first lady, according to people with direct knowledge of their reaction. Michelle Obama has spoken publicly about fearing for her family’s safety since her husband became the nation’s first black president.

Her concerns are well founded — President Obama has faced three times as many threats as his predecessors, according to people briefed on the Secret Service’s threat assessment.

Gee, I wonder why?

Nine Colorado children have been stricken with muscle weakness or paralysis since Aug. 8, and Colorado health officials and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday they're investigating a link to concurrent viral outbreaks.

The state has blessed a $5 million incentive package to help bring production of writer-director Quentin Tarantino's eighth feature film to southwestern Colorado in December.

In the face of mass protests from students, members of the Jefferson County school board majority Wednesday defended a proposed curriculum committee and called it misunderstood, while signaling the most criticized elements are likely to be cut.

This goal by AC Milan's Jeremy Menez against Parma over the weekend is just beyond:

No-look backheel. Jeebus.

Tags: Jeremy Menez   soccer   sports   video

I don't like workplace wellness programs. This isn't because I think they do no good. It's because I don't like the idea of employers deciding that they can dictate my personal health choices. Or any of my other personal choices, for that matter. Maybe it's for my own good, but so what? Lots of things are for my own good. Nonetheless, I'm an adult, and I get to choose these kinds of things for myself, even if I sometimes make bad choices.

Today, however, Austin Frakt and Aaron Carroll delight me by surveying the literature on wellness programs and bolstering my personal pique with actual facts. It turns out that wellness programs, in fact, generally don't do any good:

Rigorous studies tend to find that wellness programs don’t save money and, with few exceptions, do not appreciably improve health. This is often because additional health screenings built into the programs encourage overuse of unnecessary care, pushing spending higher without improving health.

However, this doesn’t mean that employers aren’t right, in a way. Wellness programs can achieve cost savings — for employers — by shifting higher costs of care onto workers. In particular, workers who don’t meet the demands and goals of wellness programs (whether by not participating at all, or by failing to meet benchmarks like a reduction in body mass index) end up paying more. Financial incentives to get healthier sometimes simply become financial penalties on workers who resist participation or who aren’t as fit. Some believe this can be a form of discrimination.

This is basically what I've long suspected. For the most part, wellness programs are a means to reduce pay for employees who don't participate, and there are always going to be a fair number of curmudgeons who refuse to participate. Voila! Lower payroll expenses! And the best part is that employers can engage in this cynical behavior while retaining a smug public conviction that they're just acting for the common good. Bah.

Did I mention that I don't like workplace wellness programs?

“Okay, I recognize Silver but no idea who the other two are. I’ll take a shot at the dude in the middle, though. He developed an app that helps you find the closest lumber yard?” – a commenter at New York magazine, about me, the dude in the middle of the photo-montage, in a new Vanity Fair list of white male “media disrupters“.

(Non-white-male media disrupters can be found here.)

Chattering captive-bred endangered black-footed ferrets crept out of cages into public open space Wednesday — the first freed under a new Colorado law that lets cities and counties release ferrets into colonies of their prairie dog prey.

Denver police are investigating a possible hit-and-run that left a pedestrian dead at West Warren Avenue and South Clay Street Saturday night.

Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Andrea Tantaros, and other Fox News personalities all get torched in a 10-minute riff by the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart on race in America. The host starts by noting how O’Reilly was “furious” over the media reaction to the Aug. 9 police shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr. — though […]

Reading Jon Chait this morning:

With predictable fury, supply-siders have denounced this heresy [that Reagan-era supply-side policies might not be optimal today, even granting that they were in 1980]. You can get a flavor of the intra-party debate in columns appearing in places like Forbes or The Wall Street Journal, the later of which retorts, “Good economic policy doesn’t have a sell-by date. (Adam Smith? Ugh. He is just so 1776.)”

The quote is a few months old, but – wow! – what an evergreen formula for zombie economics!

Good economic policy need not be formulated with reference to the economy.

I think maybe we need something a bit more science-fiction-y. Instead of the Laffer Curve, we have the Laffer Event Horizon, which is located in 1974, when Laffer sketched his famous curve on a napkin. After 1974, the economy fell into a black hole, for tax purposes. Specific facts about it could no longer cross the boundary of the Laffer Event Horizon, for policy purposes. A bit more precisely: within the black hole, all tax-like-paths – must be warped down and down, eventually to zero. Especially taxes on the rich.

Just a thought.

Would-be metro Denver homeowners will have a harder time saving for a down payment because rents are up almost 10 percent in the past year, consuming about 31.8 percent of median income, Zillow said in a report released Thursday.

EDGARTOWN, Mass. (AP) — The White House says President Barack Obama will deliver a statement on Wednesday, the day after Islamic State militants released a video showing an American journalist being beheaded.

Bob Somerby calls my attention to the following bit of psychobabble from Peter Baker and Matt Apuzzo of the New York Times. The subject is a photo released by the White House:

Mr. Holder, 63, is the one leaning forward, both in the photograph released by the White House and on the issues underlying the crisis in Ferguson, Mo. A child of the civil rights era, he grew up shaped by the images of violence in Selma, Ala., and joined sit-ins at Columbia University where protesters renamed an office after Malcolm X. Now in high office, he pushes for policy changes and is to fly on Wednesday to Ferguson to personally promise justice in the case of a black teenager who was fatally shot by a white police officer.

Mr. Obama, 53, is the one seemingly holding back in the White House photograph, contemplative, even brooding, as if seeking to understand how events could get so out of hand. He was too young and removed to experience the turmoil of the 1960s, growing up in a multiracial household in Hawaii and Indonesia. As he now seeks balance in an unbalanced time, he wrestles with the ghosts of history that his landmark election, however heady, failed to exorcise.

Seriously? Take a look at other photographs of Obama when he's conferring with someone. Take a look at other photographs of any powerful person when they're conferring with an underling. The boss is the one who's free to lounge back and relax. The underling is the one who has to lean forward and make his case. This is standard body language. Obama uses it so often that in just the August "Photo of the Day" gallery alone, I count it in three out of four photos where Obama is conferring with other people.

Look, I've been there. You want to say something interesting. You need a hook. But come on. If you want to make the case that racial issues are more immediate for Holder than for Obama, go ahead. But don't pretend that a bog ordinary White House photograph tells you anything. That's just embarrassing. Before long you'll be hiring body language "experts" and handwriting "analysts" to help you with your leads. Here be dragons.