Some Cold Facts

The right-wing and denialist blog suyts space has a recent post attempting to convince the gullible that no sea ice has melted since 2001. This silly notion has been occasionally making the denialist blog-rounds for some time. Oddly enough, the same blog had a similar post on the same topic over a year ago, claiming that there had been no ice melt since 2004 -- and the level at which we had a "flat trendline" then was lower than it is today. Apparently, new ice has appeared to raise the level that had existed between 2004 and 2013. Imagine that.

What does this mean? It means the loss of global sea ice is a chaotic process, even though it has a definite long-term trend. I suspect the author of suyts space is desperate to distract people from the fact that Arctic ice has just had its lowest winter maximum ever. It is important for purveyors of fantasy to get out ahead of reality whenever possible.

Denialists these days are obsessed with the fact that the area covered by Antarctic sea ice in the winter has been slightly greater the last few years than it used to be. What they won't admit is that this phenomenon is known to be caused by the same forces that are causing the Arctic ice collapse, that is, "global warming." Indeed, climate denialists try to imply that the slight increase in seasonal Antarctic ice somehow "disproves" the existence of climate change, rather than being a symptom of it. I'll deal with that in a future post as well.

In the meanwhile, I decided to create some global sea ice graphs of my own, and I found a wonderful source for data, the National Snow and Ice Data Center. This post and at least the next two will use data from that source.

Below is the first in a series of sea ice graphs. It is the average yearly sea ice area from 1980 through 2014. I have added a linear trendline. In any chaotic dataset, it is always possible to cherry pick sub-spans which allow one to create flat trendlines (which is what we see happening on suyts space), or even trendlines that slope in the direction opposite to the overall trend (suyts could have done that by starting at the point where his 2004 trendline began, and running up to the current day). Doing so, however, is an exercise in political propaganda, not a scientific practice.

In the graph below, you will notice the actual ice area sometimes goes above the trendline, and sometimes goes below the trendline. This is normal for any chaotic process. You will also notice that the trendline is trending unequivocally down. That's because global sea ice is decreasing.

fig 1 - Yearly sums of Arctic average ice area and Antarctic average ice area

You will also notice that the divergences above and below are getting larger. This is also normal for a chaotic process that is becoming increasingly unstable, signaling an impending total collapse.

The last two years diverge particularly high -- that is, the average level of global sea ice has been higher for the last two years. 2006, 2007, and 2011 diverged particularly low. Denialists will stress the last two years and ignore the others, because that’s how they roll. (They are irrational in the extreme.) Denialists will claim that climate scientists likewise concentrate only on the extremes below the trend line, but that is false, since the high numbers are also due to climate change. Human production of greenhouse gasses is destabilizing the climate in a variety of destructive ways.

Let me also point out, it makes little sense to sum up northern and southern hemisphere ice in this way. Sea ice in the north and south are subject to entirely different processes. The north is a sea surrounded by land which is covered by steppes. The south is a continent covered in an ice sheet, surrounded by water. Adding the sea ice from these two areas is like adding the scores of the Bears and the Cubs into a “Chicago sports score.” Not only does this score tell you nothing meaningful, but it excludes the White Sox, the Black Hawks, and the Bulls. In a similar way, we are leaving out land-based glaciers, the Greenland ice sheet, and the Antarctic ice sheet -- as well as ignoring the volume of the sea ice, which tells us how much ice there actually is.

If we are to concentrate only on sea ice, and only on area, I will have a recommendation for a much better way to do that in my next blog post.

Below are two more graphs, showing the sum of each year’s minimum sea ice, and maximum sea ice – that is, each year’s Northern Hemisphere max plus that year’s Southern Hemisphere max, or Northern plus Southern hemisphere min.

On these graphs, as on the graph above, the scale at the left is in millions of square kilometers. The scale differs on each graph in order to fit the graphs to a consistent size, but I can create them to a consistent scale if readers want to see that.

fig 2 - Yearly sums of Arctic Minimum and Antarctic Minimum ice

fig 3 - Yearly sums of Arctic Maximum and Antarctic Maximum ice

As with the yearly average graph, I have added linear trendlines. You can again see rapid collapse, particularly in the yearly minimum. This will become even more apparent when I separately graph each hemisphere. You an also see that the yearly maximum is trending rapidly down even with the Antarctic sea ice winter maximum increasing, because the Arctic ice is decreasing faster.

As with the “Average” graph, the last two or three years have been significantly above the trendline. This means nothing, because this is a chaotic process. You can see the Minimum graph shows the final year (2014) as lower than the year previous (2013) – the brief recent upward divergence has already ended, which is why this winter’s (2015’s) Arctic maximum has set a new record low (which will affect the graphs next year).

A Non-Governing Coalition

In the wake of the Israeli elections, Prime Minister Netanyahu has to form a new governing coalition. Too bad his rightist allies in the US Senate can't take a lesson from him. They seem unable to govern, even with a clear majority. Follow me here.

The funny thing about Hillary Clinton's press conference the other day dealing with her emails is that she seemed to be enjoying herself. Reporter after reporter asked pretty much the same nonsense questions. She took it all in stride, and didn't seem to take any of it too seriously -- because it is, after all, nonsense.

As I said nearly two weeks ago, right after the press conference, there's nothing here.The point of the faux scandal is to attempt to put Ms. Clinton on the defensive. Treating this faux news story with the contempt it deserves it the right approach.

The current chef Benghazi persecutor, Trey Gowdy, has now demanded to be given Ms. Clinton's email server -- or at least, to have it turned over to a third party. Of course, he's not going to get that. All the official and government emails were sent to other people in the government, so they're already available and already saved on other government servers. Anything private is, well, private, and he has no right to any of it.

It isn't clear what he's looking for -- well, yes, it is. It wouldn't be clear, if we assumed he wanted something relating to Ms. Clinton's duties as Secretary of State, because all that information is already in his hands. Gowdy is (supposedly) asking as part of his Yet Another Investigation Into Benghazi. What he's really looking for is something, anything, that can be presented as tawdry personal dirt. There isn't any other possible reason for the request, since investigation after investigation has already concluded there's nothing more to investigate. Even the investigation run by Republicans said that.

What we're seeing, of course, is really not Yet Another Investigation Into Benghazi, but yet another example of the inability of Republicans to govern. Their only concern -- their obsession -- is political machinations. They cannot actually do the People's work.

Interfering in negotiations to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb is one example. Shutting down the government in 2013 is another (and Republicans will have at least three chances to do that again this year). Republicans are unable to govern, even when they've got complete control of Congress. We saw it in their fumbling over passing a clean DHS funding bill. Or their inability to bring the bipartisan Senate immigration bill to the House floor. House Speaker Boehner said he'd instead pass a series of smaller reform bills. He couldn't even do that.

We see it in Republicans' inability to even pass an anti-human trafficking bill. Some Republican Senate moron had the bright idea to stick a poison pill into their own bill -- unnecessary and divisive anti-abortion language, preventing the victims of human trafficking from using federal funds for abortions if their victimization leads to unwanted pregnancies. Senate Majority Moron Mitch McConnell has claimed the language is no big deal -- he says there are enough exceptions that victims who need abortions can get them anyway. If it's no big deal though, then the language doesn't need to be there, does it? So just remove it.

But no, McConnell insists the poison pill has to stay in, and to force the issue, he won't allow a vote on Loretta Lynch until the bill passes with the anti-abortion language in.

Wait, what? What has Loretta Lynch got to do with the anti-abortion poison pill in the human trafficking bill?

Well, nothing.

Ms.  Lynch has already been waiting longer for her confirmation than the last five Attorneys General combined had to wait for theirs. The really funny part of that is how anxious Republicans are to get rid of the current Attorney General, Eric Holder. They absolutely hate him. Or at least, for six years, they've pretended to hate him. More than likely, it was all political posturing (like Trey Gowdy's pretend "investigation"). Faux News viewers fell for it, which is all that matters.

Will Democrats cave on this issue, and vote to keep the nonsense anti-abortion language in the  human trafficking bill? There's no reason for them to. If they don't, Republicans will be seen as once again trying to load legislation up with bags of flaming dog poo, as they did in forcing the 2013 shutdown, and as they did in the silliness over DHS funding. Eventually, as with DHS and the 2013 spending bill, they'll have to just take their bag of dog poo out and let the clean bill pass. In the meanwhile, Democrats are stuck with Eric Holder staying on as Attorney General. Oh my, what ever shall we do?

As with the posturing above, the point of Trey Gowdy's faux "investigation" isn't the investigation, just as the dog poo in the above bills proved the machinations weren't about the bills. Trey Gowdy is trying to embarrass the former Secretary of State and likely 2016 presidential candidate, nothing more. He's seizing on the email faux "scandal" as one way to do it. Nothing else has worked. Ms. Clinton was scoring easily 10 to 15 points ahead of even the closest of the likely Republican candidates.

So, how's this latest tactic working out for Republicans? Well, think about it. Before the email thing broke, Ms. Clinton was polling at least 10 to 15 points ahead of any possible Republican candidate. Now, three weeks later, she's polling at least 10 to 15 points ahead of any possible Republican candidate. Not much of a change.

The people who support Ms Clinton know it's a nothingburger. The people who hate her already hate her. No one has any real expectation that anyone will be swayed by this nonsense, but it's not about that. Republicans will use these faked "investigations" as a way to keep the nutty base engaged, keep them riled up, prevent them from thinking about any actual issues -- because Republicans lose on issues -- and, they hope, get them to the polls.

That's all Republicans have. They're in a constant campaign posturing mode. They sure can't govern.

Israeli Elections Today

I don't have any information at the moment. Israel is 6 - 9 hours ahead of us here in the States, so their day is already finishing as I write this. Election returns should begin to become available, although the question of who will be able to form a coalition government will not be known for some days yet.

Discuss. I will add data as I find it.

 ------

(first update 8:30 am CDT):

Israel is 6 hours ahead of US Eastern Daylight Time, 7 hours ahead of CDT, 8 hours ahead of Mountain Daylight Time, and 9 hours ahead of Pacific Daylight Time.

Polls opened at 7 AM in Jerusalem, and the first exit polling is expected around 10 PM, but that is generally considered unreliable.  In the last election in 2013, almost six million votes were cast, in over 10,000 polling places. The voter turnout then was 67.8 percent of eligible voters.

There is a good rundown of some of the issues in the Israeli election here.

In  recent days, Prime Minister Netanyahu's popularity in Israel seems to have taken as hit, as his campaign appearance before the US Congress at the invitation of Republicans appears to have backfired. In an attempt to drive up the far-right vote, he responded in recent days by taking a very hard line on Palestinian statehood. This is a risky gamble, as it might also fire up his opposition.

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(Update 3:00 pm CDT):

There is this interesting development:

Increasingly worried that he could lose Tuesday’s elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel lashed out at the country’s Arab voters, expressing alarm that a large turnout by them could determine the outcome. Opponents accused him of baldfaced racism.

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(Update 3:30 pm CDT):

For what it's worth, results seem to be coming in earlier than expected:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his chief challenger, Isaac Herzog of the center-left Zionist Union, appeared to win about the same number of seats in Parliament in Tuesday’s election, according to Israeli news media and exit polls, promising a protracted and messy process of forming the next governing coalition.

After a divisive campaign that was seen as a referendum on Mr. Netanyahu’s tenure, an intense push in the final days apparently brought a surge in votes for both major parties, with each expected to take about 27 of the 120 seats.

Together, Each of these two parties looks to take about 22.5% of the total number of seats, which will leave them both scrambling to form a ruling coalition. It would be amusing, of course, if neither of them is able to.

If these preliminary numbers turn out to be the final count, this would be a drop of almost 13% for  Netanahu's Likud party, which won 31 seats in the 19th Knesset in the election of 2013 -- itself a drop of eleven seats from the 18th Knesset. This is a pretty clear trend that doesn't look good in the long run for Likud.

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(Update 9:00 pm CDT):

Here's the latest.  It appears that the Likud Party may have the narrowest of pluralities, with 27 or 28 seats as compared to the Zionist Union Party's 26 or 27.

Mr. Netanyahu and his allies seized on the early numbers to create an aura of inevitability, celebrating with singing and dancing. While his opponents vowed a fight, Israeli political analysts agreed that he had the advantage, with more votes having gone to the right-leaning parties likely to support him.

It was a turnabout from the last pre-election polls published Friday, which showed the Zionist Union, led by Isaac Herzog, with a four- or five-seat lead and building momentum. To bridge the gap, Mr. Netanyahu embarked on a last-minute scorched-earth campaign, promising that no Palestinian state would be established as long as he remained in office and insulting Arab citizens.

In what seems to be a typical right-wing pattern there as well as here, Mr. Netanyahu may still win by having played up some of the darkest aspects of political prejudice and mysanthropy.

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(final update 8:30 am CDT 3/18):

With the counting all but finished, Netanyahu's Likud Party has won 30 of the 120 seats, to Herzog's Zionist-Union Party's 24, in what amounts to a clear victory. Herzog has conceded defeat, and Israeli pollsters are scrambling to discover how their projections were so far off. Netanyahu has pledged to work "quickly" to form a new government.

It Seemed Like a Good Idea...

It seemed like such a good idea at the time...

Forty seven senatorial morons, led by Head Idiot Tom Cotton, wrote an insulting letter which has created blowback from across the country. Surprisingly, they were surprised.

Some Republican senators admitted Wednesday they were caught off guard by the backlash to a letter warning Iranian leaders against a nuclear agreement with President Barack Obama. And Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Republicans — many of whom blessed the missive during a brisk signing session at a Senate lunch a week ago, as senators prepared to flee a Washington snowstorm — should have given it closer consideration.

This was after Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) said,“I find it hard to believe that they understood the severity of what they were doing." Secretary of State John Kerry condemned the letter, as did former SoS Madeline Albright, and Maine's Independent Senator Angus King.

But it wasn't just Democrats who voiced objections. So did The Washington Post. The Wall Street Journal (!) questioned the wisdom of the letter, as did Fox "News" blonde Megyn Kelly.

Oh, and also, Germany.

[German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier], whose country is among the group of six nations negotiating with Iran, said the March 9 letter warning that a nuclear deal may not last beyond the Obama Administration injected a new element of distrust into the already difficult talks.

“It would have been difficult enough without the letter of the 47,” Mr. Steinmeier said in an appearance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington. “Now it has become somewhat more difficult.”

Read that quote again. Notice: it is a group of six countries involved in these negotiations with Iran, including the entire UN Security council -- that includes Russia and China as well. It's not just President Obama going rogue and refusing to recognize the authori-tay of the Republican Party. Pretty much the entire planet wants these talks to work, and will be involved in enforcing any deal that is reached.

Not all Republicans idiots are contrite. Kentucky Idiot Senator Rand Paul admitted the letter was really addressed to President Obama, thus giving away the game. It wasn't intended to inform Iran about how the American constitution works. It was really all about insulting and undercutting the President, regardless of the damage caused to the world, to the prospects for disarming Iran, and to America. Republicans don't care about any of that trivia.

Louisiana Governor Idiot Bobby Jindal said that every 2016 presidential hopeful should show support for the 47 Moron letter "to make clear to Iran that they are negotiating with a lame duck president," apparently to send the message that no president should be allowed to negotiate with any foreign country during a second term. Republican presidential Wannabe Idiot Jindal doesn't want to do anything meaningful if (Dog forbid) he should ever become president.

Most of the 47 Morons seem to be standing behind this idiocy. A willingness to violate the Logan Act should, one might think, make one ineligible to hold public office in America. We can do our best to make this an issue in the 2016 campaign -- "Have you ever intentionally attempted to interfere with a presidential negotiation with a foreign country?"

Some Republican idiots tried to back away from the letter. It was all a joke you see:

“The administration has no sense of humor,” one aide complained, after reports that the letter was likely a felony offense, and could amount to treason.

Apparently, at least some Republicans are not interested in getting caught committing treason, so we're supposed to now imagine it was meant as gentle ribbing, rather than an attempt to side with Iranian hardliners in their effort to help Iran get a nuclear bomb, or at least to cause a major war.

Yeah, right.

Ferguson Police Chief Resigns

The chief of police of Ferguson, MO has resigned, only days after the release of a US Department of Justice report documenting racial bias in that town, following the murder last August of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown.

Four other members of the Ferguson police department have already resigned, and a fifth has been fired, in the wake of revelations about police profiling, and discriminatory arrests, fines and stops, along with racist emails and a pervasive atmosphere of racial bias.

Memo to Republicans: You've Got Fail

Hillary Clinton held a press conference today to answer questions about email.

A week ago, the New York Times reported that during her time as Secretary of State,  Ms. Clinton had used a private email server to conduct both personal and official business. The Times speculated on whether any rules may have been broken. None were, since the current restrictions on official State Department email use were not in place until John Kerry took over as SoS. Before Ms. Clinton, Colin Powell had also used personal email for state business, eliciting no one's concern.

Further, this was already an old story, since the State Department had requested last October for all former Secretaries of State to turn over all their old emails, and Ms. Clinton had complied shortly thereafter, producing 55,000 pages of documents. She has since asked that all those emails be made public. The State Department is reviewing them to remove any classified or personal material, and is expected shortly to comply with her request. Despite this, speculation rages from the usual suspects about what non-data she isn't hiding in the emails she has completely released.

Only three other former Secretaries of State ever used email at all --  Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright.. Ms Rice and Ms Albright apparently hadn't made extensive use of email, and didn't produce any documents when the State Department requested them. General Powell hadn't retained any emails, having deleted them all, eliciting no one's concern, and so he didn't produce any either. Reportedly, speculation isn't raging about what these three aren't producing.

The server that Ms Clinton had used was one owned and operated by the Clinton family, and habitually used by the former president, William Jefferson Clinton. It was kept physically secure by the Secret Service, and its software was kept secure by the fortune of the Clinton family, who were able to afford the best software security available. There is no evidence of the server being less secure than any government servers, nor any evidence that any sensitive communications were compromised. This complete lack of anything to be concerned about seems to have led to raging speculation about how insecure the server wasn't.

The majority of emails sent to and from Ms, Clinton's account had either come from, or were sent to (or cc:'ed to) other people who worked at the State Department or in the Obama Administration, which means nearly all of the official emails already had copies on other government servers, leading to raging speculation about emails that are already in government possession. 

In short, Ms. Clinton seems to have followed both the letter and the spirit of the law, and is in the process of producing more information than anyone has asked for. Naturally, Republicans are therefore doing their best to invent a scandal, led by the current chef Benghazi persecutor, Trey Gowdy. As with all the other non-scandals Republicans have invented about the Clintons personally, the Obama Administration, or the Clinton Administration, nothing is expected to come from this non-scandal either, except a lot of snippy emails.

47 Morons

Forty-seven  Republican senators have gone rogue, trying to revolt against the Administration. Unlike the noble and heroic characters of the Japanese folktale of the "47 Ronin", these Republican seditionists are possessed of the basest motives and are engaging in the most dishonest and despicable sort of gamesmanship.

In their effort to undermine not only the President, but also the Constitution, forty seven Republican senators have written an open letter they pretend was addressed to "the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran." It is insulting and condescending, and its clear purpose is to interfere with President Obama's negotiations with Iran over nuclear weapons development.

I provide a link to the letter here (or click on the small version below). Go read it. I'll wait.

The message of this letter is clear: It doesn't matter what you agree to with this President. We Republican senators will never approve any agreement he negotiates with you. And the next president can therefore nullify any unratified agreement with a wave of his pen. So don't bother.

This is stoopid on so many levels. First, the chief Iranian negotiators were educated in the United States. Even if they hadn't been, one would think they'd have educated themselves about the nature of our nation before entering into negotiations. They are likely already to know how the American constitutional system works. Little constructive purpose could be served by treating them like idiots.

Second, the Constitution gives the President the power to negotiate treaties and other international agreements. For the Senate to interfere in that process as these senators are trying to do violates the basic principles of the separation of powers. Their lecturing on the Constitution is thus self-negating.

Third, late last year, Republicans tried to make a stink about the President writing letters to the leader of Iran, encouraging him to help fight ISIL. Now here they are, writing a letter to "the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran," as if they hadn't previously criticized doing exactly that.

The worst dishonesty though is in who the audience of this letter really is. Yes, Republicans are trying to scuttle an international agreement that would stop Iranian nuclear weapons research, because such an agreement would make war with Iran less likely. An agreement would also mean yet another foreign policy victory for this President, once again undermining the Republican meme of President Obama somehow being inept at his job (Republicans are still trying to live down the embarrassment of Bush 2). Yes, Republicans are very much afraid an agreement is in sight -- they brought out Bibi in their attempt to stop it, and now they're doing this. That's all true, but these are all secondary considerations.

There's a reason this was an "open letter" rather than a communication sent through any official channels. It's not really intended to send a message to "the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran." It is intended as fodder for the nutty right-wing base, in an effort to keep them riled up and engaged. The letter isn't really a lecture on the nature of our Constitution meant to educate Iranians -- it is intended to remind the nutty American right about the meme of President Obama trying to ignore the Constitution.

These 47 Morons are not pretending to lecture "the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran" about the Constitution. They are pretending to lecture the President. When they say, "you may not fully understand our constitutional system," it is the President toward whom they are directing that insult.

Republicans are losing this fight, and they know it. The President is free to negotiate an end to Iranian nuclear hopes, and they can't do anything about it. Mitch McConnell tried to schedule a vote in the Senate to pre-block approval of any such agreement, and was forced to un-schedule the vote. This is a fight Republicans can't win. All they can do is get their crazy base angry at President Obama once more doing something good for America.

ADDENDUM: It turns out, the Republicans who wrote this lecture on the Constitution apparently do not themselves understand the Constitution. They should be embarrassed, but then, Republicans are way beyond the capability to be embarrassed by their stupidity and perfidy.

Presidential Pop

Since sometime in the summer of 2009, we've been hearing that President Obama has "historically low approval ratings." Is that true? Well, he has, recently and briefly, fallen below 40% approval in some polling, and that sounds pretty dismal. Is that unusual for a modern president?

Let's look at the range of approval highs and lows for the last thirteen presidents, Roosevelt through Obama, which is as far back as the data goes.

The presidential polling data for this article is taken from the Roper Center Public Opinion Archives. I invite interested readers to create a similar set of graphs for any other polling organization (say, Gallup), which should yield similar results.

First, here is a graph which shows, for every president since Franklin Roosevelt, the highest and lowest approval ratings. The presidents are in chronological order.

The first striking thing about this graph is the high degree of overlap. All presidents,with only three exceptions, spanned the range from 50% approval to 70% approval -- that is, their highest was above 70%, and their lowest was below 50%. In fact, since Johnson, that overlap range is wider still, from a high exceeding 70% to a low under 40%.

The three exceptions to those overlapping ranges are: one Democrat, Kennedy (who never fell below 56% approval) and two Republicans -- Nixon (who never exceeded 67%) and Reagan (who never exceeded 68%).

What can we say about President Obama's "historically low" ratings? They seem, in fact, to be fairly average. That came as a mild surprise. What is more surprising still is that the patron saint of modern Republicans, Ronald Reagan, whom we frequently hear was amazingly beloved, actually had approval ratings that seem mediocre at best. But how bad were they? Read on.

The next graph shows the presidents in order by their highest approval rating. Who hit the highest highs?

One surprise that jumps out here is that the president who hit the highest high was George W. Bush, at a whopping 92% popularity, which he hit shortly after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It seems likely anyone who was president at that moment would have reached a similar high, but let's be generous and simply acknowledge that the worst terrorist attack in American history did indeed happen on his watch, and give him credit for being president at the time.

One other surprise is that the beloved Ronald Reagan isn't anywhere near the top. In fact, he's almost at the bottom. The only president with a lower high point is Richard Nixon, and Reagan beat Nixon by only a single percentage point. That's saying something.

And Barack Obama, with his "historically low" ratings? He is nearly smack in the middle, with seven Presidents showing higher highs, and five with lower highs. Eisenhower, who occupies the center seat, had a high of 79%, beating Obama's high of 76% by a statistically insignificant three percentage points, only two points more than the margin by which Reagan beat Nixon.

To be fair, the myth about President Obama's "historically low" ratings isn't that he was never as popular as other presidents. It is that he has achieved abysmal depths. So let's re-order the presidents by their lowest recorded popularity.

Here we find that the president with the highest low point was John Kennedy, whose popularity never fell below 56%. In fact, only three presidents -- Kennedy, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower -- have managed to not fall below 40%. The president who hit the lowest mark -- the one with the "historical lows" we keep hearing about -- was not Barack Obama, but George W. Bush, the guy who also hit the highest high. That's a curious fact, and one to which I shall return.

President Obama's abysmal rating? His lowest point is actually amazingly high. Only three presidents -- Kennedy, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower -- did better. So much for the myth of Obama having "historically low" ratings, eh?

And the beloved Reagan? He's tied for the center point with Lyndon Johnson, both of whom hit a low of 35% approval. Johnson was so unpopular he declined to run for a second full term. All of the presidents with approval lows worse than Johnson and Reagan are generally considered to be among the least effective of modern presidents -- G. H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter (both of whom were unpopular enough to loose their re-election bids), Nixon (forced to resign in disgrace), Truman (a disappointment after Roosevelt), and G. W. Bush (whose ineptitude led to two military quagmires, soaring federal debts, and the worst economic crisis since before any of these presidents were elected).

Looking closer at the curious case of George W. Bush, who has both the highest high point and the lowest low point -- this means he has widest popularity range of all these presidents. Below are two graphs, the first showing the actual approval range of the presidents, listed by the size of those ranges. The second shows the ranges themselves, to give a better feel for the magnitude of the differences.

The most striking thing about these graphs is that the presidents with the widest ranges are usually accorded less respect than the presidents with narrower ranges -- probably because a wider range tends to mean the president in question is likely to have been able to fall lower in popularity, precisely because their range was larger (or, conversely, their range was larger precisely because they fell lower). And indeed, the six presidents with the widest ranges of popularity -- G. W. Bush, Harry Truman, G. H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon -- were also the presidents with the lowest lows in popularity. (Johnson tied with Reagan to achieve the sixth lowest mark.)

An interesting fact about John Kennedy is that he achieved both the narrowest range of popularity rankings, and -- at 56% -- he had, by far, the highest low point. This stands him in stark contrast to G. W. Bush, who had the lowest low, the highest high, and the widest range.

Perhaps Kennedy's narrow range and very high low point are both due to his short time in office. He was, after all, assassinated after less than three years as President. Perhaps he simply didn't have time to become unpopular. Perhaps presidents who are in office longer have more time to achieve both soaring highs and dismal lows.

While that may be a contributing factor, it can't be the whole story. Below is a graph showing the popularity ranges of the presidents, with them listed in order from the longest-serving to the shortest (darker ranges for presidents who served longer). The graph following that shows the lengths of each president's total time in office measured in years. There doesn't seem to be an obvious correlation.

The president with the longest time in office -- FDR -- had a very narrow range of popularity rankings. Only Reagan, Eisenhower, and Kennedy had narrower ranges, and two of these -- Reagan and Eisenhower -- served for two entire terms. This means presidents with three of the four narrowest ranges all served two or more complete terms. And while Kennedy did serve a very short term (which might otherwise explain his narrow popularity range), his wasn't the shortest time in office. That distinction is held by Gerald Ford, whose presidency was even shorter than Kennedy's, and whose popularity range is smack in the middle -- six presidents having larger ranges, and six having smaller.

If there is a correlation between length of service and size of popularity range, it would appear to be the opposite of what one might expect. To some extent, presidents whose popularity remains rather stable tend to remain in office the longest.

This isn't a hard and fast rule -- G. W. Bush is a spectacular exception in one direction, JFK in the other, but their situations can both be written off as special cases. JFK was assassinated, so we really don't know how either the full range of his popularity would have played out, nor how long he would have remained in office (would he have had a second term?). Bush's high point was due to the 9/11 attacks which (we have to assume) he had nothing to do with, and so can't take credit for. Both of these presidents therefore had externalities which affected their popularity. We can't know how popular they would have been if not for these history-shaking events.

This also means length of service can't have anything to do with the clear differences between President Obama's popularity and, say, Ronald Reagan's. Though Obama's second term is not yet over, one assumes he will fill it out and serve as long as Reagan did -- and, barring any externalities, the range of his highs and lows is unlikely to change significantly from what it is now. We can therefore draw what are likely to be some safe conclusions.

President Obama's highest popularity rating was rather average for presidents since Franklin Roosevelt, whereas his low point was very good indeed -- fourth highest out of thirteen, or in the top one third.

President Reagan, in contrast, had a low point that was right in the middle of the pack, tied with Lyndon Johnson's low point, with six presidents doing better and five doing worse. His high point, however, was absolutely dismal, beating only Richard Nixon, and that only by a single point.

The conclusion? Whereas President Obama's approval rating can be considered somewhere between average and very good, the beloved Reagan's must be ranked average to terrible.

Further, think about the evidence provided by the presidents who reached the highest approval ratings -- G. W. Bush, G. H. W. Bush, Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. Four of these -- the two Bushes, Truman, and Johnson -- also had four of the five greatest overall ranges in popularity. And three of them (the Bushes and Truman) were among the five lowest popularity ratings (those five being G. W. Bush, Truman, Nixon, Carter, and G. H. W. Bush). What does this mean, that the same presidents who scored highest also tended to score lowest?

Probably it means that presidential popularity is a pretty meaningless measure. The popularity at any given moment, or any given extreme, may have nothing to do with what comes after, or what went before.

Reagan's dismal popularity performance, coupled with the near-worship of modern Republicans, also implies that a president's popularity while in office may have little resemblance to the myths that are formed once that time in office is done.

And the persistent and false meme about President Obama's "historically low" popularity shows the myths may be unrelated to reality even while a president is still in the White House.

Grand Opening (almost)

This blog is a descendant of past efforts.

In the summer of 2010, I joined with a handful of other passionate people who'd been commenting on Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight.com when that site ended -- Nate had moved on to bigger things. In the spring of 2011, four of us formed Logarchism, and that effort lasted until July of 2012. Soon after, I created two email lists, RationalPolitics@yahoogroups.com and Politicalogics@googlegroups.com, both of which have been enjoyed and used by a small handful of passionate commenters of a variety of political leanings.

A blog format seems to be better for encouraging discussion than the old email list format. Hence, this new forum. The drawback is that an email list allows commenters -- not just the list owner -- to create new threads. There are other, more complex forum formats that also allow that. I hope to find ways to welcome a number of ways for people to participate.

I'll have a couple of threads open here in a few days. Until then, welcome.