Last week, Glenn Beck invoked the memory of Thomas Paine to encourage American citizens to protest against Obama's proposals to increase taxes on the wealthy in order to provide the poor and middle class with benefits such as healthcare and improved education.

Ironically, Paine was no libertarian--today, he might even be recognized as a -gasp- socialist. Given the lionization of Paine by libertarians, and now Beck, you're probably thinking that I'm just inventing this. In fact, the writings I'm about to share with you demonstrate that if Paine was alive today he would probably be to Obama's left, and probably more of an anathema to Beck's kind than our current crop of politicians.

As some of you might know, the New York State Senate recently released a document with all of its pork projects for the years 2003-2004 and 2004-2005.

One little problem. It was in a password-protected PDF with images (i.e. non-searchable). Our Republican (and dick) Senate Majority Leader decided to purposely release the information in the most unreadable way possible.

In fact, virtually all news stories posted in the day after the dump (thanksgiving, of course), said nothing other than the vast unreadability of the data.

Our State Assembly, which is run by (slightly less corrupt) Democrats released the information in searchable PDF form with no password.

To make a long story short, I cracked the password and ran the document through some sophisticated OCR (optical character recognition). I then ran it through some slight parsing I wrote to make it more readable. The results for 2004-2005 are now available on The Albany Project's Website for all to see (see the diary).

We've already uncovered some interesting scandal-like behavior (including some from the guy NYBri ran against).

Enjoy!

A front-page post today suggested that favorability ratings were pretty useless in determining the winner of this month's Senate elections.

In a one-off comment, I suggested that once factoring the PVI of a state into the equation, much better results emerge, which come very close to nailing the election results in most cases.

After I made that post, I did an analysis of the 10 widely watched Senate races with incumbents (MI, MO, MT, NJ, NY, OH, PA, RI, VA, and WA), and came up with a pretty good and sane methodology for working favorability ratings into election results.

The results are on the flip.