Other speakers on the docket: cellist Zoë Keating, planetarium guru Ryan Wyatt, and many more. Check it out at www.TEDxSF.org.

Lead Birther Orly Taitz, a self-taught lawyer, dentist, and real estate agent, has been filing federal lawsuits to remove President Obama from office. She finally has a court date…for driving at amazingly reckless speeds. (see also the Orange County courts, traffic case 14852LC)

During the campaign I pointed out that an individual donor can maximize the effectiveness of his/her campaign contributions by giving to knife-edge races. By definition, these are the same races, whichever side you’re on. I listed them on my ActBlue page. I also gave a link to the National Republican Senate Committee.

The five knife-edge races were (D vs. R): Minnesota (Franken vs. Coleman), Georgia (Martin vs. Chambliss), Mississippi (Musgrove vs. Wicker), Alaska (Begich vs. Stevens), and Oregon (Merkley vs. Smith). Early in the season I suggested North Carolina (Hagan vs. Dole), but as Election Day neared Hagan pulled ahead. So that one doesn’t count.

If “knife-edge” is identified correctly based on polls, we’d expect two or three of these races to go to Democratic candidates. Franken, Begich, and Merkley make three. Just about par.

In addition to left-handed presidents (Obama, Clinton, perhaps Reagan), it was mentioned that Osama bin Laden is also left-handed. Left-handers are more variable than the general population in a number of traits. They are over-represented among the verbally gifted and are more likely to solve problems in unusual ways. But they are also more likely to be criminals. Bin Laden combines all three categories.

Update: here’s the podcast. And here are my slides (PDF).

Sandra Aamodt and I have written about this before [PDF] [annotated]. An unusual number of left-handers use both sides of their brain to process language (one in seven), significantly more than the rest of the population (one in 20). So one might be more likely to expect enhanced communication skills in some left-handers. Think of Obama, Clinton, and Reagan – but not Bush I. There’s also a tendency for left-handers to solve problems in creative ways. These could be useful traits in a president.

For the statistically minded: is the frequency of southpaws significant? Probably; five out of the last twelve presidents is significantly different from the general incidence of 10% by Fisher’s exact test.

In that calculation I am not including Reagan. He wrote with his right hand but is said to have been naturally left hand dominant.  However, I do not know of any convincing documentary evidence for this claim. However, this does demonstrate an important point – before World War II, left-handedness was discouraged in American schools – in Japan, it still is. So only limited ddata are available because of this past bias against southpaws.

Air date is Sunday, near the end of the first half-hour of the program. The show’s start time varies. It’s mostly 8-9AM Eastern, 7-8AM Central, and 6-7AM or 7-8AM Pacific. Here’s an old list of station affiliates. Check your local listings!

At the top of the list are Paul Krugman and Arianna Huffington, natural choices. But further down, some names clearly don’t belong: Andrew Sullivan, Maureen Dowd, Chris Hitchens, Chris Matthews, Fareed Zakaria, Tom Friedman, and Fred Hiatt. Update: Sullivan punctures their bubble (and again).

The problem appears to be that “liberal” was not a clearly defined term (although the authors claim to have used concrete criteria such as a desire for universal health care and opposition to the Iraq war). Perhaps the practical criterion was “liberals plus people who annoy us Republican loyalists.” In this light the list makes more sense. Too bad they didn’t pause to consider that many of these people annoy quite a broad political demographic.

There’s a second advantage to defining liberalism in a way that includes nonideological or middle-of-the-road pundits. It never hurts to work the referee, i.e. call someone liberal as a way of getting him/her to lean further rightward. In this light, the inclusion of the NYT and WaPo op-ed directors (Shipley and Hiatt) as well as the WSJ news director (Seib) makes perfect sense. Even assuming these three people are actual liberals, in practice they don’t carry out editorial policies that lean left. For example, they publish Brooks, Kristol, Krauthammer, and Will.

The full list:
25 Michael Pollan
24 Kurt Andersen
23 Kevin Drum
22 Ezra Klein
21 James Fallows
20 Gerald Seib
19 Andrew Sullivan
18 Glenn Greenwald
17 Hendrik Hertzberg
16 Matthew Yglesias
15 Maureen Dowd
14 Christopher Hitchens
13 Bill Moyers
12 Chris Matthews
11 Fareed Zakaria
10 Markos Moulitsas Zuñiga (Kos)
9 David Shipley
8 Josh Marshall
7 Rachel Maddow
6 Oprah Winfrey
5 Jon Stewart
4 Thomas Friedman
3 Fred Hiatt
2 Arianna Huffington
1 Paul Krugman

First, his last best hope, a motion to have 12,000 rejected absentee ballots brought into the Election Contest Court, has been denied. These ballots contained 654 ballots selected by the Coleman team for re-examination. Extensive coverage is here at The Uptake, official court documents are here, and color commentary by blogger WineRev is here.

The re-examination of all 12,000 ballots seemed to be a desperation move anyway. It is not known how they will divide. Coleman needs to win them by a margin of 226 or greater. These ballots would need to break at least 51-49 in Coleman’s favor to give him any chance at all. (This is essential: if they are drawn from a 50-50 sample, the odds against picking up 226 votes is 53,000-1 against.) But rejected ballots are more likely to favor Democrats, so it’s not clear that somehow de-rejecting these ballots will do much. But the court ruling takes a step toward closing even that window.

Second, Norm Coleman has accepted a job with the Republican Jewish Coalition, suggesting that he is under financial strain and/or is preparing for a likely final defeat.

Now, how to estimate the crowd from this image? Update: an interactive version via the Washington Post is here.