Nate Silver and the nerdlingtons at FiveThirtyEight are liveblogging the Virginia election results (which are hidden and secret) and have called it, meaning it is officially over, by law: “7:45 EDT [Nate]: OK, the 538 decision desk is calling this one for R. Creigh Deeds. Almost half the vote is in, and although we’re a little bit light on turnout from areas like Richmond, neither Moran nor McAuliffe is doing anywhere near as well as they’d need to to make up for Deeds’ large advantage. It’s really a battle for second place at this point.” MORE, Silver, MUSH MUSH! MORE »

• Obama is still draining all the stimulus recession dollars on his personal communist pet project: re-sodding the National Mall in such a way that one million red roses spring up in shape of Stalin’s silhouette. Terrible, just terrible. [RedState]
• Hillary Clinton isn’t sure whether she’d like America to have the opportunity to read the sequel to Dick Cheney’s torture fan fiction—Waterboarding Towards Bethlehem: A Nationbuildingsroman—and said some awkward thing about Cheney being weird, just to avoid the question! [Daily Intel]
• Nate Silver sees four (or, “4″) futures for the Republican Party. He thinks a drift towards libertarianism is the best way to go, so that should tell you something about the other three options. [FiveThirtyEight]
• Obama is making good on his pinkie swear to no one that he is so all about Service. [The Caucus]
• NRSC Chairman Jon Cornyn has given up on pretending that the Dems aren’t going to secure 60 Senate seats. So, do with that what you will Norm Coleman—you will anyway. [Matt Yglesias]

• Dylan plugs in!: Plot Functions Weekly centerfold Nate Silver is moving to Brooklyn, of all places. [FiveThirtyEight]
• Obama has a new website, Financialstability.gov, which means Joe Biden will presumably be on the talk show circuit this week, hyping his new daguerreotype flipbook, financeeconomy.website. [The Caucus]
• What we talk about when we talk about waterboarding: Andrew Sullivan calls out the Washington Post for being the Dick Cheney propaganda organ it really is. [Andrew Sullivan]
• It appears there is much confusion within Obama’s new defense against the dark arts team over whether they are still allowed to publicly speak of the “global war on terror.” [Ben Smith]
• New polls, which Nate Silver will now be analyzing from a really chill independent socialist coffee shop, show that for whatever reason, people are feeling better about the economy. [CNN Political Ticker]

Hmm, let’s see how annoying we can make this post… MORE »

Despite the fact that Math Porn purveyor Nate Silver has revoked beer’s hard-earned recession-proof status, we venture to guess there’s a few of us who may still find utility in “What’s a Girl to Do When It’s Time to Put Down the Drink?” — a one-woman show by Tara Handron about alcoholic women in various stages of breakdown and recovery. MORE »

Welllll Mr. Fancy Baseball and Politics Man knows nothing about the Oscars, apparently! He thought that Taraji Henson would win Best Supporting Actress and Mickey Rourke would win Best Actor. Silver’s calculations excluded several important factors, including: 1) Penelope Cruz is very hot and 2) Sean Penn starred in a feel-good Issues Movie that concerns an issue that many people in Hollywood care about. Nate Silver must be publicly shamed, his statistics license revoked, and his $700,000 book advance donated to a math academy of his choice. [New York Magazine, OSCAR.com]

• ROBOT Magazine February centerfold Nate Silver has predicted that Slumdog Millionare will be the new senator from Minnesota. [Andrew Sullivan]
• Republicans are telling slanderous lies about Nevadan God of Impotence Harry Reid’s high-speed casino-to-Hollywood ambitions. [Matthew Yglesias]
• Michelle Obama has bought the penny a fancy new look from J.Crew. The coin will now feature a photo-diary of Lincoln’s many houses, including: a log cabin, a wooden log presumably just adjacent to a log cabin, the “White House”, and the Capitol Building. [Top of the Ticket]
• Mittens the (Fat) Cat is selling half (1/2) of his retainer of barionial estates, namely his haunted forest ski sanctuary and his Boston pied a terre. [AMERICAblog]
• International gerrymanderer Barack Obama has recently purchased the territory of Uzbekistan and will probably make it our 51st state. [RedState]

In the months leading up to the presidential election, the single most important time of the day, every day, was late in the afternoon, when Nate Silver’s “Today’s Polls, dd/mm” from FiveThirtyEight would appear in America’s Google Readers. Nothing excited liberals more than seeing a new SurveyUSA poll showing Obama +7 in Virginia, for example, precisely because Silver told us all that SurveyUSA was a good pollster. But you know who else was good, and got less credit, was Mark Blumenthal over there at Pollster.com. Poor underappreciated Mark Blumenthal! He used fancy regressions on his poll averages too, you know!? Well we haven’t looked at either of these sites since November 5, but this random Andrew Sullivan post tells us that Silver and Blumenthal are still doing poll analysis — and they’re reaching shockingly different conclusions. MORE »

Statistics freak Nate Silver was supposed to go away after the election, which he rigged with algebra or something in order to create the first black president, which is the ultimate political statistic, for masturbating. Now the fivethirtyeight.com sensation has a column in the gay fashion glossy, Esquire. It’s kind of interesting! Basically, Nate has figured out — using his patented number voodoo — that the worst people in America are literally disappearing, leaving a nation of sexy multi-racial city slickers who drive hybrids and do anal on first dates. MORE »

Hey people cheer up! Your Nate Silver, that mathbot you all loved so much until the election was over, has persisted with his math and numbers to this very day. Most of the time he just worries about that whole boring sordid Franken/Coleman mess in Wasilla. But maybe because Depression reporting is such a “hot trend,” he has written about what the chances are we will actually enter one of these depression thingums in the near future. MORE »

The Al Franken team announced today that under its special recount tracking methodology, Franken’s ahead by 22 votes over that cock Norm Coleman! The maths here seem rather terrible: “The Franken camp’s methodology involves taking down the opinions of the local election officials regarding the challenged ballots, and assuming that all the challenges will result in those local officials being upheld by the state canvassing board.” Nah, they just read Nate Silver’s projection and shaved off a few votes, to make it look authentic. [TPM Election Central]