We’ve been onboard American Airlines Flight 36 from DFW to Madrid, Spain for about 20 minutes now. Expected flight duration is about 9 hours and 14 minutes. We’ve backed away from the gate while the pilots finished their checklist. We start the long taxi to the appropriate runway and then stop after only a few minutes. The pilot comes over the PA and announces that they’ve got a tire pressure light flashing, so we’ve got head back to the gate to have the maintenance crew check the tires and pressure sensor. Fine. Trouble is DFW is a busy airport. Our old gate is already occupied, so we’ve got a bit of a wait until another gate opens up. Twenty minutes later we park at a gate.

“Oh gee, that indicator light was in fact the result of a flat tire. And damned if it don’t beat all, you need all them there tires to land without ensuing death and maimery and such, so we can’t just put Fix-a-Flat in it, no sir, what you really need is a new tire. I’m sure I’ve got one sitting around here somewhere, but it’s one of them fancy EYE-tal-yon models, so it’s gonna cost you a bit. ‘How long’ you say? You’ve got a connecting flight to catch? Oh, I don’t know, it’ll prob’ly take about half an hour or so, but since it’s an international flight and since you’ve already detached from the walkway, you’re going to need to remain in your seats for the duration.” [spittoon clang]

Sixty minutes later, the cockpit crew is overheard complaining that the “mechanic” didn’t bring the right wrench for the 777′s lugnuts. (Maybe Boeing uses the Potrzebie System of Measurements).

June 12, 2010 8:40:21 PM CDT (DFW)

We taxi from the gate and take to the skies, 170 minutes after our originally scheduled departure time. Everyone cheers the tardiness. Had the flight deck door been ajar, I’m sure we could have witnessed some manly shoulder punching and purely heterosexual towel snapping, too. Yet, as many of the little kiddies on the plane have already played out all the videogames and read all the inflight magazines, this unfortunate incident effectively chopped three hours out of the evening peace onboard.

June 13, 2010 12:54:37 PM CET (Spain)

We weren’t able to make up any lost time over the Atlantic, due to the fact that American would have to spend some more gas money if they stepped on the throttle (never mind all those missed connections), so we land at Madrid’s Barahas Airport roughly 180 minutes late. Well looky there, yep, it appears we’ve done missed our connecting flight, Iberia 3718 to Boukhalef Airport in Tangier, Morocco, oh, by about 45 minutes. Upon arriving at the gate, we’re informed by the cabin crew that although they personally know of no details on our connecting flights, we will, in fact, be greeted at the gate by ticketing personnel with revised boarding passes and gate information.

Surprise, they lied.

June 13, 2010 2:45:37 PM CET (Spain)

Shortly after disembarking, and thanks to some craftily idiotic Iberian attendant, we became seperated from our fellow travelers. Lorin, Maddie, Sofie and I have been wandering around Terminal T4S at the airport for almost two hours now, looking for someone ANYONE who even knows who in the frak we need to talk to to figure out where in the frak we’re supposed to be. You read that right. No one in the terminal, particularly no one at Iberia Airlines knew what had happened, much less what they were supposed to do about the situation. Everyone we spoke to at the Iberian desks passively “attempted” to reach someone at the American Airlines desk for more information, but they couldn’t find a phone number that worked, or even knew where the American desk was located. Keep in mind that by the time we landed, Barajas had known of the tire situation back in DFW and the ensuing delay for at LEAST nine hours. Feel the burn.

As dumb luck would have it, and no thanks to anyone except ourselves, we found the other members of our party after wandering onto an underground tram, which led us to the terminal at the other side of the international airport. They, unlike us, had been directed straight to the only open American Airlines information desk in Madrid. Although they were spared the three hours of wandering the airport, they were still standing in line waiting to speak to the clerk. Nevertheless, although there were open seats on a flight to Tangier from Madrid that afternoon, American Airlines didn’t want to shell out the cash to pay full price for replacement tickets, since that flight was with another airline. They will only put us on a flight to Tangier that offers a discounted rate, which won’t happen for at least a couple of days. However, they are willing to put us on a flight to Casablanca the following day (even though it is still a five hour drive from there to our destination), and they’ve got the name of a local rat’s nest in Madrid that will give us a free breakfast so long as we pay full price for two rooms. (FYI: The breakfast wasn’t free.)

THANK(frak) You, American Airlines for your deceit and greed. And you, Iberia, for your ineptitude and laziness. And that shitty Hotel Auditórium for your rude reception and wooden mattresses. And the entire Kingdom of Spain for just pissing me off to no end … you make me wish I’d taken French in high school.

June 14, 2010 11:16:11 PM WET (Morocco)

Despite La Main de Fatima Frappant, we finally arrive in Cassablanca, Morocco and look for the check in desk for a flight from here to Tangier, paid for out of our own pockets. It seems American Airlines couldn’t be bothered to pay for us to travel domestically to Tanger. I guess I can understand, since they at least got us within the same time zone as our originally ticketed destination.

June 14, 2010 3:18:00 PM WET (Morocco)

We land in Tangier, Morocco via Royal Air Moroc Flight 474. We’ve missed well over 24 hours of our Moroccan vacation thanks to a jerk in Dallas who won’t even bother to kick the tires before pulling out of the driveway. Thanks for making sure we didn’t blow up on touchdown, ya jerk. But on a happier note, our brief stay that night at the Hotel Andalucia Golf Tanger (5*) was fantastic.

And thus we begin our Moroccan vacation.

June 18, 2010 2:30:00 PM WET (Morocco)

So get this … a business man, a politician, and a professor walked into an office in Rabat …

Today we spent 45 minutes with the president of the Moroccan senate, Mohamed Cheikh Biadillah. The American political equivalent would be a hybrid of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi. He was intelligent, forthright, generous, and quite charming. We talked at length about international and regional politics, the Western Sahara issue, interest groups, and campaign financing. He spent a fair amount of time discussing the Texas Legislature, one of my favorite topics, given that Texas Representative Will Hartnett was part of our small delegation.

Jack and his mom were looking at an uncertain future thanks to the deaths of John and the uncle. Bitter to be sure, but it’s clear Jack didn’t spend the next few years brushing up on his college applications. As I’m a cynic, I’ll propose that he spent those years practically waiting for his mom to die so that he could finally get revenge against the FBI agents who betrayed his father. All those dreams of John, gone. In the end, what difference did it make what John had done or the life he’d lived in order in hopes to improve the lives of the family?

Is this outcome much different than if John had refused to work for Agent Ross to begin with? Worse, I suspect, in that Jack would have otherwise blamed his father for the death of his mom, but at least he would have had some chance at turning his life into something more meaningful than simply a mirror image of his father’s dark past.

So yes, I’m man enough to admit I cried during the entire last episode of Lost. And maybe it’s just the piano music (which reminds me of Lost!) but I also cried for the Marstons … the ones that were and those that might have been.

I too feel like Jack’s short storyline would have benefitted a great deal from a reunion of sorts. I wanted some virtual comfort for him. He didn’t know his dad that well, and often thought he was just a murderer. How meaningful and reparative would it be if he (albeit briefly) sought out his father’s friends and acquaintances from the earlier story in his quest for Ross? In the process they could tell Jack how much John’s help meant to them. I’d like to see Jack go through a bit of self exploration and maturation, such that these folks wind up giving Jack some comfort and healing, and thus give Jack the end-game option of simply humbling Agent Ross (by disarming) rather than traveling down the all to easy path to a blackened soul. Make John’s life mean something more than a passage of genetic traits for gunslinging.

Does anyone else feel the same?

There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of infrastructure when it comes to collecting, storing, and analyzing state legislative roll call votes. Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal have an extremely comprehensive dataset of roll call votes for the United States Congress. The folks at UC Berkley have a large collection of roll call votes for various legislative bodies around the world at VoteWorld. Nevertheless, there’s nothing that I’ve found that would indicate much of a comprehensive place for state legislative roll call data. What little I’ve found is in the form of:

• Gerald Wright’s roll calls across all 50 states, but only from 1999-2000.
• Seth Masket’s impressive roll calls for California ranging from 1901-2003.
• Boris Shor has data from all the state legislatures, but I’m uncertain how far back it goes, and as of yet it’s unreleased. (I think they’re still waiting for a few journals to publish some of their works in progress).
• I’ve heard a rumor that Mark Jones at Rice has data on the Texas House stretching back to 1973, but my repeated attempts at contacting him have utterly failed.
• It looks like Robert Hogan at LSU has state house roll call data for 28 states from 1995-2000, but he hasn’t released the data either it seems.
• ProjectVote Smart indeed has roll call votes for a great number of state legislators, but they only have the resources to keep track of votes on key bills, not the complete record.
• CRAN, the Comprehensive R Archive Network, houses a variety of roll call datasets for a few key legislative sessions, but it’s very much an ad hoc experience.

So my question for all involved is this: “What the hell?” As political scientists, we love data and lots of it. I know there’s lots and lots of good data on state legislative roll call voting sitting out there somewhere. But it sure as hell isn’t easy to locate and analyze it.

Now while I’m yelling about researchers hoarding state data, I need to appropriately yell at myself too. I’ve got a collection of all the roll call votes (or as we call them here, “record votes”) for the Texas House from 1995-2009 and so far I haven’t really shared them with enough folks, hence this post. I need to find a place to put these votes so that everyone who wants to analyze them can get to them. Moreover, I don’t really want to just drop a gigantic text file as a web link on some random page. I would much rather see a more comprehensive mechanism by which any roll call researcher could contribute to and/or use data from a large pool.

I imagine such a mechanism as a web-driven database, where one can browse the data from each of the states and import/transcode/export roll call votes in a variety of formats, including everything from the compact VoteView style to a comprehensive SQL database dump. Ideally, if you’re using R you could automatically draw the appropriate dataset over, without any manual chicanery. So far I haven’t even seen such a tool for any legislative body’s votes, much less that for state legislatures.

Any comments from those in the field? Is there any interest in such a contraption? I mean, I could implement a fancy prettified roll call storehouse, but if I’m the only one using it then it doesn’t do anybody a damned bit of good.

This is from the work I've done in my dissertation. This chart shows the level of partisanship between the political parties in the Texas House of Representatives across 18 years of record voting (otherwise known as "roll call votes").

The center line, at 0 should be your reference when viewing this movable chart. The further away a party is from this center line, the more partisan their voting behavior. To help simplify this, the bigger the circle, the less bi-partisan they are.

I've collected all the roll call votes from the Texas House of Representatives from 1991 through 2009. Then I use a dimensional scaling method, W-NOMINATE from Keith Poole's VoteView research. I also do some creative aggregate calculation for the political parties and "Speaker's Teams", and squeeze in a nifty little trick from Gerald Wright that applies a Groseclose-Levitt-Snyder transformation to get all the sessions within the same scope.

[Updated with 2009 data.]

Regular Expressions Book

EDIT / Update: 

1. It all started going downhill last year when I noticed that it literally spewed out any gas over 3/4 full in the fuel tank.  Since this job didn't qualify as a DIY, I took it to the dealership.  $2,600 later and the tank fills just fine.  Luckily, later that year Audi decided to fix this defect in the whole line of cars, and thus refunded me that expense.
2. Then I got this check engine light (CEL) ... the computer/scanner tells me that the engine is running too lean, meaning it's got too much oxygen coming in to the combustion chamber.  After a few weeks of hunting down cracked and broken vacuum hoses throughout the engine bay, the code now stays off and the engine runs great.
3. A few months later, I notice that during a heavy rain the rack that holds the battery, along with the brake boosters, master cylinder, and ECM module filled completely with rain water.  Audi didn't think to remove a plastic cap that drains this out ... Sadly, by the time I fixed it, the brake fluid reservoir and brake boosters got water in them, then rusted.  So I flush it as best I can, but now my brake booster squeaks like nails on a chalkboard every time I pump them.
4. In the course of flushing my brake fluid, I figured I might as well replace the brake disc rotors and pads.  This is about a month ago.  While midst replacement, I notice that a CV joint boot that holds in axel grease and protects the joint had recently obliterated itself.  The clue to this issue was the lack of axel grease on the front drive axel, yet everywhere else around it, such as the wheel well, brake rotors, brake calipers, suspension linkage, yeah ... all that crap had lots of axel grease when there shouldn't be any.  Funny how that happens.  I replaced the front drive axel (which comes with the CV boots) and all was well...
5. Then I got another CEL ... this one told me that I have a stuck valve in my torque converter.  I had seen this particular code come up once before about a year ago, but it went away.  Looking online, folks said this generally comes on when the Automatic Transmission Fluid (ATF) is too low.  Odd, given that my friend/neighbor and I had changed the ATF and transmission filter about a year ago.  Interesting.  When I approach the Audi dealer about doing another ATF change, thinking I must have done it wrong, the Audi dealer refuses, saying the fluid is good for the life of the car ... I call horseshit. This leads me to my latest ...
6. I take the car, which now is showing some symptoms of transmission issues, to a european transmission rebuilder, hoping that a proper fluid change will fix my problems.  Sadly, after several days on the lift, they inform me that the low fluid was due to a leak.  They fixed the leak, but the damage was already done.  Clutch plates had burned.  The torque converter is in serious trouble.  My trusty old ZF 5HP19FLA transmission isn't so trusty anymore. The estimated fix for this one?  Between $2,800 and $3,400 US dollars.  Holy shit.
7. I'm thinking that I should just drive it until the transmission collapses in a whimper or calamitous implosion.  But that might happen in the next couple of months.  I'm not really set up to spend $3,400 on a transmission rebuild, but then again I'm not set up to buy another car when this one completely fails, either.
8. Oh yeah, I almost forgot.  When you drive the car above 60 mph, the whole thing shakes like your granny's false teeth in a blizzard.  Looks like some control arm bushings need a little love, too.
9. I love my car.

Jesus riding a dinosaur

Larry Flynt (of Hustler Fame) is tired of seeing all this good money go to bad people, what with all these slick auto manufacturers rolling in the hay with our hard earned virgin taxes.  So, dear old Larry is looking for a little government assistance for something a little more near and dear to our hearts, or at least our loins... He's asking for a measly $5 billion to help out the US porn industry.  Now some of you may shrug this off as excessive or just silly, but here's some figures to ponder...