So I took a few more minutes, and discovered that there are 3 – yes 3 – bundlers who have in 2004 or 2008 donated to either Kerry/Obama AND Bush/McCain.

Here’s the hall of fame:

August Busch III, Anheuser-Busch (Kerry/Bush, McCain)
John Connors, Microsoft (Bush/Obama)
Kenneth C. Griffin, Citadel Investment Group (McCain/Obama)

There were two others, but while the names matched, the states and employers did not – so I didn’t credit them.

So out of a total of 2373 bundlers who contributed to Bush or Kerry in 04 or Obama or McCain in 08, 3 of them crossed party lines. I’d have expected more…

Skewz has a podcast of their chat with me up on their homepage. I won’t be able to listen till I get some time later in the day or tonight; feel free to listen and let me know what a dork I am in the comments.

It’s amazing to watch how phrases – like that – suddenly flash up on Memeorandum and my RSS reader, in an almost-balletic display of coordinated rhetoric.

It pisses me off, because it’s a transparent substitute for real thought and criticism, and turns the people who should be talking about the campaign – folks like Kevin Drum, Josh Marshall and Ezra Klein – into copyboys for the political talking point of the day.

It’s almost like they coordinated what they were doing…

(a quote from Mickey K, in a 2007 post of mine):

Another party I’m not invited to. And you aren’t either: Vlogging fogey lashes out at ur-whippersnapper Ezra Klein, upon learning that Klein has created a private Townhouse-like email group where liberal bloggers and editors hash out issues before they let the public in on the discussion. … P.S.: Yes, I have private email discussions too, and there are probably some advantages in having these talks in front of a group instead of one-on-one. (If, say, Sidney Blumenthal emails five leftish bloggers privately, all five might think they have an exclusive. If they compare notes, they won’t.). But the innovative virtue of Web journalism, I’ve always thought, is that it makes the back and forth process of argument and investigation relatively transparent to everyone. If the Klein Klub succeeds, isn’t there a threat that it will a) compromise independence, in part because participants will always worry if they are using something that should be kept private and will feel they owe the other members; b) will encourage groupthink, as everyone works out the tacit party line before presenting it to their sheeple-like readers; c) encourage propgandism (see (b)); and d) become the place where the real conversation happens, a conversation the non-elite public isn’t privy to. … P.P.S.: Who’s in the Klein Klub? Have they published a list of names? The sheeple demand to know at least that! … P.P.P.S.: Chait, I know you’re in it. Who else? …

Why, you may ask, am I upset that my ideological colleagues are so deeply in the tank? I talked about that a while ago as well…(back in 2005):

For much of my life as a teen and an adult, I’ve been involved in risky things.

I walked steel while my father built highrises; I’ve sailed offshore, climbed rock and mountains, raced cars and bicycles (the most dangerous!) and motorcycles. I like doing those things and the people who do those things, in no small part because they have very little bullshit in them.

If you lie to yourself about where you are and what you’re doing while sailing a small boat from San Francisco to Los Angeles, you are in a world of trouble. If you lie to yourself while setting protection on a rock face a thousand feet above the ground, you’re going to die.

I don’t like a lot of what the Republican party has to offer; that’s OK, I think we need a national dialog to make good policies. It takes two.

But given that, it may be puzzling to some (hey, JC, how’ re you?) why it is that I bash the media for their blind partisanship toward establishment liberalism, instead of cheering them as an ally.

It’s because I find myself in a risky place surrounded by people who have lost the ability to tell bullshit from reality. Our party is wounded, leaking ideologically and demographically, and we sit here drinking quack nostrums made from apricot pits and listening to fake spirit mediums tell us everything will be OK because our dead ancestors FDR, JFK, and LBJ are looking over us.

They’re not.

Nope, they are not. So if you want to help Obama win, stop the bullshit and start facing reality.

OK, when I looked at Valdis Krebs post on the overlap between bundlers, I felt that he hadn’t done a very good job on the numbers. I still feel that way, and spent some time at breakfast today downloading bundler data from the Public Citizen website, and doing some fast analysis on it (honestly, I spent more time converting the HTML to csv). Here is the Excel spreadsheet, so you can play with the data yourself.

Here’s some basic data:

506 unique Obama bundlers
528 unique Kerry bundlers
60 overlaps

1094 total bundlers

5.5% pct overlap/total
10.2% pct Kerry that overlaps
10.6% pct Obama that overlaps

725 unique McCain bundlers
432 unique Bush04 bundlers
125 overlaps (not 128 as Valdis found – don’t know where his data came from)

1282 total bundlers

9.8% pct overlap/total
22.4% pct Bush04 that overlaps
14.7% pct McCain that overlaps

So roughly twice as many GOP bundlers overlapped from Bush04 to McCain. Draw your own conclusions – I’m not sure what I think of that, and whether it’s useful information.

But I’ll add to the dataset over the next week and we’ll play with it some more.

From Nick Denton’s LA gossip blog, Defamer:

Uh-oh. Barbra Streisand—referred to among the elite Democratic core as the Black Buttah Widow for the way her endorsements mean the certain kiss of death—will perform at an Obama fundraiser at the ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel on September 16. This is a room that holds only 700 people, so attendees will be expected to pony up for the privilege. From Variety.com:

Obama will start the evening with a 5 p.m. dinner event for about 250 people at Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, the historic estate once owned by the legendary Doheny family. Tickets for the event are $28,500.

Later, he will attend a reception at the Beverly Wilshire, followed by Streisand’s special performance. Tickets for the event are $2,500 per person.

Co-hosts for event include the DreamWorks team of Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, as well as political consultant Andy Spahn. It’s also being organized with Obama’s Southern California finance team.

Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen, too? Why don’t they just wheel out a coffin that says “OBAMA 08” and drive a symbolic last nail into it with one of Sarah Palin’s spare seal clubs? And speaking of the VP candidate, Streisand has weighed in on her website with an essay on the Brooke Hogan-radar-evader, entitled, “McCain Doesn’t Get It: Women are not that stupid.” It’s a lot more enjoyable a read if you set it to the tune of “The Way We Were.”

Here in Los Angeles, the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) has been going through some challenges, as the LA Times did what it sometimes does well, and launched an investigation into self-dealing and – in a word, corruption – among the local leadership.

The national union responded by placing the locals in trusteeship, and retaining former California AG John Van de Kamp (disclaimer: a friend of my wife’s) in charge of an investigation.

Good for the Times and good for SEIU.

Here’s an oped in today’s Times from Andy Stern, president of the SEIU:

Recent reports in The Times have raised serious questions about how money from a local chapter may have been misused. The stories accuse Tyrone Freeman, president of Local 6434, of steering payments and contracts to companies owned by his relatives and other financial improprieties.

The SEIU, deeply troubled by these allegations, immediately launched its own investigation, and, within two weeks, Freeman and his field director had gone on leave and the SEIU had taken over running the local union.

At the SEIU, we understand that reform, like charity, must begin at home.

Our unions represent some of the hardest-working men and women in America, workers who sweep floors and empty bedpans for a living wage. The first responsibility of every union official is to do what is right by those who pay dues out of their paychecks every week. When we fail in that obligation, our union loses its moral center and its soul.

Any misuse of member dues calls into question the hard work and reputations of thousands of honest and committed rank-and-file members, stewards, local union leaders and staff. What’s more, it hands anti-worker corporations and reform opponents the ammunition they need to defeat workers trying to organize and win fair contracts.

I’m at the head of the line when it comes to kicking the Times for its failings, let me be similarly aggressive about cheering them for a success.

From the NY Times:

MSNBC tried a bold experiment this year by putting two politically incendiary hosts, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, in the anchor chair to lead the cable news channel’s coverage of the election.

That experiment appears to be over.

After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.

The change – which comes in the home stretch of the long election cycle – is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s perceived shift to the political left.

“The most disappointing shift is to see the partisan attitude move from prime time into what’s supposed to be straight news programming,” said Davidson Goldin, formerly the editorial director of MSNBC and a co-founder of the reputation management firm DolceGoldin.

As Rasmussen notes, the media is getting hammered by the public because of the perception that they are in the tank politically.

Willie Brown is probably the smartest politician I’ve ever personally met. I’d pay good money to see him and Karl Rove sit down and chew the fat on the mechanics of politics – there’s an Internet TV show idea for someone for free – and today, in the SF Chronicle, he’s got his take on Sarah Palin.

Palin’s speech to the GOP National Convention on Wednesday has set it up so that the Republicans are now on offense and Democrats are on defense. And we don’t do well on defense.

Suddenly, Palin and John McCain are the mavericks and Barack Obama and Joe Biden are the status quo, in a year when you don’t want to be seen as defending the status quo.

From taxes to oil drilling, Democrats are now going to have to start explaining their positions.

Whenever you start having to explain things, you’re on defense.

I used to go watch him at the Alameda County Labor Council’s BBQ, where he once finished his speech by exhorting the whole crowd to put their hands up in the air. Then he told them to reach down and take out their wallets. Then to told them to take the wallet from the person on the right, take out a bill, and pass it out to be collected.

I thought it was a brilliant piece of stagecraft. My GOP friends thought it perfectly summed up Democratic political philosophy.

BTW, in his column today, he slags my old town, Oakland:

By the way, there’s a new dining tip for people going out in Oakland.

Be sure to order soup.

That way when the robbery starts, you can slip off your jewelry and drop it into soup so the robbers won’t see it.

…zzzzzinnnngggg….

In my work life, I follow a lot of blogs about social media; one of them is ‘The Network Thinker‘ (in my Bloglines feeds to the right over in the blogroll).

There was a post there today by blog author Valdis Krebs on ‘bundlers’.

I downloaded data of the top bundlers of donations for the 2000 and 2004 Bush campaigns and the 2008 McCain campaign. What’s the overlap of donors between the Bush and McCain campaigns? Will the same people influence both campaigns/administrations? Or will it be starkly different groups? Or something in between?

Below is a map of those who donated to BOTH Bush and McCain. The campaigns are shown as the two red nodes on the left of the map. The green links show donations coming into the McCain 2008 campaign. The blue lines show donations coming into the Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004. The 128 bundlers, who have contributed to both McCain and Bush, are shown in the arc on the right.

A nice graphic follows, and then the conclusion:

Most of McCain’s 534 large bundled donations [76%] came from donors who did not donate to either of the Bush campaigns. Yet, this kernel of 128 bundlers keeps consistency across all three Republican campaigns in the 21st century.

The Gang of 128 may not allow McCain to wander too far from the current philosophy and approach. If elected, McCain may be different than Bush, but he might not be that different.

Even smart people can be stupid sometimes, and even people who do social network data representation and analysis for a living can be misleading.

So, instead of showing the complete network of bundlers, and highlighting the overlap, Valdis shows only the overlaps – strengthening the conclusion that McCain’s campaign is ‘more of the same’.

Instead of looking at the amounts, and giving some idea of how much money the overlap represents – we get nothing.

And, finally, it would be useful to see how many of the bundlers were also bundling for the other side – as a not-insignificant number of them do.

I love this kind of data analysis, and get pissed off when it’s been done badly. As in this case.

If I get some time this week, I’ll play with this – in fact, let’s make it a group project. Can some of you help out by downloading the bundler database from, say Public Citizen into a csv table and sending it my way?

I’d love to get data from this cycle and ’04, for McCain, Bush, Obama, and Kerry…we can look at the overlaps and relative amounts. Any other analysis ideas?

So, increasingly deranged (see here and then her) Sully and many of the Netroots crowd are bitterly clinging to the “when will McCain drop Palin” tagline.

Seriously – and I mean this seriously, as someone who wants Obama to win – how do we get him to drop Biden for Hillary?