Time for the Monday OTB Caption Contest^TM

(AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

Winners will be announced Thursday PM

Last Thursday Contest winners will be announced Tuesday PM

Time for the Monday OTB Caption Contest^TM

REUTERS/Heino Kalis (SPAIN SOCIETY FOOD)

Winners will be announced Thursday PM

Time for the Monday OTB Caption Contest^TM

REUTERS/Heino Kalis (SPAIN SOCIETY FOOD)

Winners will be announced Thursday PM

In the discussion on Obama’s apparent 365-173 Electoral College victory, Rodney Dill asks, “How close is this, historically? The popular vote difference seems like it was pretty big by modern standards, but usually that would result in an even more lopsided electoral vote.”

It’s an interesting question. Dave Leip’s Atlas has the results for every election.

• In 1980, the first election I seriously paid attention to, Ronald Reagan’s 50.75% of the vote gave him a 9.25% margin over Jimmy Carter, with 41.01%, with Republican sore loser John Anderson getting 6.61%. That translated into an Electoral College landslide of 489-49.

• In 1984, Reagan beat Walter Mondale 58.77% to 40.56% to get an Electoral College landslide of 525 to 13, with Mondale winning only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia.

• In 1988, George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis 53.37% to 45.65% and won the Electoral vote 426 to 111.

• In 1992, Bill Clinton beat Bush 43.01 to 37.45, with Ross Perot getting 18.91% and finished with an Electoral College margin of 370 to 168.

• In 1996, Clinton beat Bob Dole 49.24 to 40.72, with Perot pulling 8.4% — comparable to Reagan’s margin over Carter — and won 379 to 159.

• In 2000, George W. Bush beat Al Gore in the Electoral College 271 to 266 (one Gore Elector from DC abstained) despite losing the popular vote 47.87% to 48.38%.

• In 2004, Bush beat John Kerry 50.73% to 48.27% and took the Electoral vote 286 to 251.

• In 2008, Obama beat John McCain 52.34% to 46.31% — roughly Bush 41’s margin over Dukakis — to get a much smaller Electoral College margin.

I suppose I should do some sort of sophisticated social science statistical analysis of these data but one presume’s it’s been done already.  Eyeballing it, though, it seems that there’s very little correlation between popular vote margin and Electoral vote margin.

One thing to keep in mind with the foregoing analysis, too, is that it’s very much skewed by California.  In the first three of these elections, it was a reliable Republican state; since then, it’s been reliably Democratic.  (Obama won 2/3 of the vote this year; Reagan won by a 17 point margin in 1980 and 16 points in 1984.)  Presidential candidates don’t bother to campaign there, except for fundraising purposes.   Regardless, its 55 Electoral votes grossly distorts the picture.

Typos fixed.

The Spin Cycle Edition OTB Caption Contest^TM is now over.

REUTERS/Vincent West (SPAIN)

✰ THE WINNERS ✰

First: William d’Inger – With the last U.S. sword factory having moved to Mexico, American pacifists are reduced to beating washers into plowshares.

Second: Gollum Stop! – - Hammer time!

Third: Charles Austin Entry 3367 of the rejected Peter Gabriel music video themes.

HONORABLE MENTION

Rodney Dill – The Sock Puppet Liberation Army stages its first operation in preparation for Denver.

RODNEY’S BOTTOM OF THE BARREL

Citing appliances as the devils means of giving women to much time around the house, Islamic youth take a righteous stand against western values. – yetanotherjohn

Well, that was a fun little nostalgic romp. Rodney returns (per Charles Austin’s submission) on Bash Steel day with your regularly scheduled Caption Contests.

The Skip To My Loo Edition OTB Caption Contest^TM is now over.

REUTERS/Steven Shi (CHINA)

✰ THE WINNERS ✰

First: Wyatt Earp – “Whatever you do, don’t ask for shitake mushrooms!”

Second: Charles Austin – Stalls are bourgeois and were destroyed in the cultural revolution.

Third: brainy435 – Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie had to scrap their original reality show, The Bulimic Life.

HONORABLE MENTION

Charles Austin – No Peking, Beijing.

RODNEY’S (AT THE) BOTTOM OF THE BARREL

Don’t get the number two. That stuff will go right through you. – yetanotherjohn

Photograph by: Steven Shi
Restaurant fixtures designed by: Yew Shi Ting – John425

Illegal Immigrant Jobs American’s Don’t Want To Do #137: Ex-Lax Tester. – Rodney Dill

The Trashman Cometh Edition OTB Caption Contest^TM is now over.

(AFP/Fabrice Coffrini)

✰ THE WINNERS ✰

First: FormerHostage – Noooo they be stealin’ my Bucket! (It may be I’ve been hangin’ around at ICHC too much — rodney dill)

Second: utka – Despite all odds, Hillary is still running.

Third: yethanotherjohn – Its not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

HONORABLE MENTION

Cowboy Blob – Stand back! I have a hamster! And I’m not afraid to use it!

Bithead – Even Scotty was never able to keep the anti-grav units in line when Sulu did those warp speed 180’s.

charles austin – Marvel rejected Litterman as a superhero.

markm – Swiss riot police try to corral an unruly participant in the annual running of the trashcan event, a sister event to Spain’s running of the bulls.

Elmo – That’s no ordinary rabbit … that’s a most foul, cruel and bad tempered rodent you ever set eyes on. Look that rabbit got a vicious streak a mile wide, he’s a killer. He’ll do you a treat mate … (obviously Jimmy Carter has switched to live catch.)

ℛODNEY’S BOTTOM OF THE BARREL

Scott McClellan’s last days.

“you took my stapeler… but you can’t have my trashcan!”

“I will give up my wastebasket when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.”

“SERENITY NOW!!!”

The Monday Contest is already calling for a recount.

My first post* at Outside the Beltway was at 9:47 the morning of January 31, 2003. If my math is right, that was five years ago.

When I started this thing, the blogosphere was in its infancy, with most of the big political sites no more than a year or two old. There were still regular Big Media pieces explaining, often incorrectly, exactly what a “blog” was. Now, the most popular blogs are getting traffic numbers rivaling newspaper circulation rates and one can envision in the not-too-distant future a day when we’ll have to explain to the kids what a “newspaper” was.

In the last five years, I’ve written 16,675 posts here — some of them even good. My various co- and guest bloggers have added another 3000 or so: Rodney Dill (848), Steve Verdon (810), Kate McMillan (281), Alex Knapp (145), Greg Tinti (136), Dave Schuler (128), Steven Taylor (110), Richard Gardner (103), Chris Lawrence (69), Robert Prather (38), Dodd Harris (27), John Burgess (25), Steve Bainbridge (6), Aaron Brazell (5), and Bill Jempty (1). (Robert Tagorda and Leopold Stotch were also early contributors but their user accounts are no longer in the database, even though their posts are still part of the archives. According to my Fourth Blogiversary post, they had 240 and 152 posts, respectively.)

We’re a couple weeks shy of hitting the 25 million unique visitor mark on SiteMeter, which is the only measure I have that goes back more-or-less to the beginning of the site (February 4th); others have been lost and different metrics used as we’ve switched site hosts.

Thanks, as always, to all who visit, comment, and link.

_________

Related:

• Fourth Blogiversary
• Three Year Blogiversary
• OTB: 2005 Year in Review
• OTB: 2004 Year in Review
• Two Year Blogiversary
• One Year Blogiversary

*That post, and the first three months’ worth, were at Blogspot at a URL that has since been hijacked. Thankfully, all the posts were migrated to this domain.

The DREAMM for TOMMORROW Edition OTB Caption Contest^TM is now over.

REUTERS/Larry Downing (UNITED STATES)

The Winners:

First: charles austin – “Hsut up!”

Second: manning – Oh S**t on the American Dream, I am talking about MY dream!

Third: McCain – These end zone celebrations are going much too far.

Honorable Mention:

RT – “Well, someone had to have said Beetlejuice three times. I’m here aren’t I?”

markm – Ok folks, quick impression of Monica’s ass.

Roger – “Touchdown! Crap…still a year to go.”

stillearly – “Don’t worry, my health care plan will only screw you by this much.”

John425 – “…and So, my fellow AMWAY dealers…”

Scott_T – …And then I climbed out of Rodney Dill’s last caption contest like this…..

Rodney’s Bottom of The Barrel

Hillary’s impression of ‘Touchdown Jesus.’

…well if Karl Rove was still around the sign would’ve said ‘DREAMM’

“I’m upping the standard for leadership in this country, so now up yours.”

The Monday Contest is already signalling for overtime.

The next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live tonight at 7 Eastern.

I’ll be joined for the first segment by David Pinto of Baseball Musings talking, of course, about Barry Bonds breaking Hank Aaron’s record.

We’ll also be taking your calls at (646) 716-7030.

UPDATE: David was on for the first 18 minutes or so and made some very good points about the nature of the evidence against Bonds and why we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss his achievements. Our own Rodney Dill called in during the last 10 minutes to talk about the Iraq War and the politics of withdrawal. In between, I carried on a monologue about the war, popular culture, and other things in the news.

If you missed it live (or, for some odd reason, want to hear it again) you can click the link above. Alternatively, the embedded media player below will play the show for you.

Rodney Dill noticed yesterday afternoon that OTB had passed the 20 million unique visitor account as measured by SiteMeter. That’s about 19,900,000 more than I’d have ever expected when I started this site in January 2003.

As always, thanks to all who visit, comment, and link.

Previous milestones:

• 19 Million – June 12, 2007.
• 18 Million – April 28, 2007.
• 17 Million – March 31, 2007.
• 16 Million – March 9, 2007.
• 15 Million – February 19, 2007.
• 14 Million – January 29, 2007.
• 13 Million – January 7, 2007.
• 12 Million – December 23, 2006.
• 11 Million – December 3, 2006.
• 10 Million – November 8, 2006
• 9 Million – September 18, 2006
• 8,000,000 – July 19, 2006
• 7,000,000 – April 28, 2006
• 6,000,000 – January 18, 2006
• 5,000,000 – October 15, 2005
  
• 4,000,000 – June 8, 2005
• 3,000,000 – February 27, 2005
• 2,000,000 – November 8, 2004
• 1,000,000 – June 19, 2004
• 500,000 – May 13, 2004
• 300,000 – February 17, 2004
• 250,000 – January 17, 2004
• 200,000 – November 14, 2003
• 150,000 – October 17, 2003
• 100,000 – August 14, 2003
• 50,000 – May 19, 2003
• 25,000 – March 30, 2003
• 10,000 – March 22, 2003
• 5,000 – March 21, 2003
• 1,000 – March 4, 2003

The Eraser Head of State Edition OTB Caption Contest^TM is now over.

www.thisislondon.co.uk

The Winners:

First: G. A. Phillips – Tony, youarr my faavrott girlyman!

Second: Cowboy Blob – What is with zis country? They call efferybody “Guv’na?”

Third: Wyatt Earp – Arnold and Tony re-enact their favorite Pillsbury Doughboy commercial.

Honorable Mention:

physics geek – “Hasta la vista, Blairby!”

DAveD – “You’ll be back.”

Su Berton – Arnold to Blair: “You’ve just been ERASED.”

pudge – “You wily old arian, don’t even think about invading us again!”

charles austin – “No, really? You actually eat haggis?”

Rodney’s Bottom of The Barrel

Tony: “Say… you aren’t inclined to ‘roid rage are you?”
Arnie: “Yippee ki-yay M—– F—–”

Arnie: “C’mon I just want to borrow the princes for my next movie.”
Tony: “Uh… You’ll ‘ave to speak to the queen.”

Rodney Dill has left the Blogosphere — “But Ah’ll be Baaaack!” — See you all around mid-July.

The Enough With The Butt Cracks Already Edition OTB Caption Contest^TM is now over.

(AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

The Winners:

First: yetanotherjohn – moon river-dance

Second(tie): Timmer – Airport security at San Fransisco International Airport took a strange turn on Thursday…

Second(tie): Steven Taylor – The TSA’s dream future.

Third: charles austin – It is amazing what you can see on Google Earth if you zoom in far enough.

Honorable Mention:

pudge – This scene from the upcoming documentary about Al Davis, seems to explain one of the flaws in the Raiders draft selection criteria.

yetanotherjohn – The lines to the prison shower were long as Paris Hilton spent her first day of incarceration.

Scott_T – ….and my father told me, “Be careful that you don’t drop the soap there.”

McGehee – “These things are always so awkward. I never know what to do with my hands.”

Rodney’s Bottom of The Barrel

“One more Star Wars ‘That’s no moon’ reference and I’ll…”

“So which one of you goes by the name El Chorizo Grande?”

“Its twoo! its twooo!”

The Grand Opening of Rodney Dill’s new line of StarButts coffee shops came off without a hitch.

“I just thought of something, can you remember to pick up some Cottage cheese on the way home?”

The trap was set, it was only a matter of time and that desperado, Kancho Villa, would be sure to make an appearance.

“Take just one sheet, and pass the roll down the line.”

The Thursday Contest has already resorted to reading the directions.

Dave Schuler, who occasionally contributes here and at Dean’s World in addition to maintaining his own site, laments a trend he’s seeing among his favorite blogs:

Brilliant bloggers who posted once a day, maybe two or three times a week, are linking arms as associate bloggers on blogs with larger readerships. They’re still posting once a day, maybe two or three times a week. But because of the numbers of associate bloggers at the larger blogs those blogs are being updated ten, fifteen, or more times a day and the individual blogs of the associate bloggers are languishing. Posts are at the top of the page for a few hours, maybe minutes, and then scroll off, sometimes off the front page entirely.

I’m on both sides of the fence, since, as a blogger, I’ve been recruiting very good bloggers who update infrequently to OTB but, as a reader, I’ve quit reading a handful of old faves because they’ve chosen co-bloggers poorly.

Still, the trend is inevitable and largely good. Some great bloggers from my early days in the game fell off the map because the demands of everyday life kept them from posting with enough frequency to stay atop people’s “must read” lists. That tends to take a toll on readership which, in a vicious cycle, lowers the incentive to blog when time permits and further drives down readership.

That was bad enough in the old days, when most of us kept up with our favorite blogs via bookmarks and/or blogrolls. A couple years ago, though, readership started drifting towards aggregators like Memeorandum and RSS feeds. I was slow to catch on to RSS but now almost never look at my blogroll. And, if I happen not to look at the particular feed that has your updated-five-times-a-month blog the day you posted — or there’s a glitch in your feed or my reader or you got overwhelmed in a flurry of posts from other sites on the feed — I miss the post.

Enter the group blog. Collectively, a handful of good writers who post a few times a week can create enough content to make readers keep coming back. That keeps the bloggers motivated and the readers happy. The key, though, is putting together a group that’s more-or-less coherent so that the blog still has a “voice.” Perhaps the best examples of this phenomenon are Crooked Timber (a collection of left-of-center academics), Volokh Conspiracy (law profs with a libertarian-right bent), Counterterrorism Blog (CT experts) and Winds of Change (an eclectic warblog). With the possible exceptions of Eugene Volokh and Marc “Armed Liberal” Danziger, none of their lead authors are sufficiently prolific to sustain a major blog.

Despite a bevy of co-authors, OTB is still mostly me. I’ve always been prolific because I write fast and had jobs that allowed me to multi-task. Still, having additional authors gives our readers more content and showcases several fine voices who might otherwise not be heard. And it gives me a little breathing room.

Steve Verdon contributes several posts a week, often in a few flurries. He’s all but shut down his own site and does all his blogging here nowadays. He brings some genuine expertise on economics and a passion about some other issues to the table.

Rodney Dill has taken over the caption contests for me. They’ve have died out a long time ago otherwise, because the effort of finding pictures and picking winners stopped being fun and started being a distraction for me well before I turned them over. The contests are more popular than ever and, as an added bonus to our readers, someone other than Rodney now has a chance to win.

Alex Knapp and Chris Lawrence contribute when they can and add valuable insights to the discussion. Alex is an attorney by training and tech guy by trade and Chris is a gypsy political scientist. Robert Prather is currently internet deprived but promises to rejoin the fold any time now. All three are more libertarian in their philosophy than I am (Steve is, too, for that matter) but they’re close enough politically and, more importantly, in conversational and analytical tone that I think the group thing works.

The Pros and Cons, as I see them:

PROS:

• For the bloggers: Less pressure to crank out posts, a larger audience, and a possibility of earning some beer money
• For the readers: More content and viewpoints in the same basic intellectual milieu

CONS:

• For the bloggers: Less control over the identity of the site, posts pushed off the page faster
• For the readers: Some of the authors might appeal less than others, Occasional confusion over who said what

The pros of a well-constructed group easily outweigh the cons, I think. And those cons are easily mitigated. In OTB’s case, at least, each of the contributors effectively has a blog-within-the-blog, since all the posts they’ve written are put in their own category.* These categories have their own RSS feeds, and everything. So, conceivably, you could subscribe just to what Steve Verdon or Chris Lawrence or whoever your favorite(s) is/are and ignore the rest.

*The exception, oddly, is me. Since I wrote nearly 10,000 posts when this was a solo blog, there was no need for me to create an Author category and I have not gone back and added that category for many of the pre-October 2004 posts.

The Silver Bullet Edition OTB Caption Contest^TM is now over.

(AP Photo/Police Handout)

The Winners:

First: Bithead – I swear there was a naked girl in here a minute ago.

Second: Ator – You can lead a horse to water but it’s the rider that gets drunk at the pub…

Third: Michael – Warning Label: “Operate your Horse only in an open, well ventilated space as fumes can cause serious illness or death. Keep away from open flames or sparks.”

Honorable Mention:

charles austin – Mongo picked the wrong horse to punch this time.

Mark – No sense beating a dead horse man…

Gollum – Horse: “Hay!”

Bithead – Apparently, someone helped Jack off his horse.

Timmer – Once again the rumor that Kevin Aylward and Rodney Dill are the same person ran rampant through the internet.

Rodney’s Bottom of The Barrel

Don Imus’ next chance at a radio show salvaged his career due to his award winning contest — “Horse, Jack-Ass, or John Kerry.”

the new Geico ad — “So Simple Even A Horse Can Do It” — was also a miserable failure

Lessons in marketing — Godiva Savings and Loans found themselves facing financial ruin for only employing one-half of the iconic pair.

Eventually Ned was glad he’d received a Quarter-horse in change instead of five Buffalo nickels.

Unfortunately for the Lone Ranger, Silver had never been trained in the Heimlich Maneuver

DRUDGEBREAKING: Rosie O’Donnell seen leaving ABC after salary negotiations brokedown. Rosie wanted a yet undisclosed amount per appearance on ‘The View.’ ABC stated her value was a load of horse hooey. In her haste to depart Rosie inadvertantly stomped the visiting Donald Trump to death. Developing…

The Monday Contest has already outsourced the job.