Jeff Garlin is best known to most as Jeff Greene, Larry David's manager, on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, but since I refuse to pop an extra $20 - 30 a month for a bunch of movies I'm never going to watch I haven't seen him in that role (yeah, yeah, I know- Game of Thrones).
I have seen him as crazy Uncle Kelbo on Wizards of Waverly Place where I thought he was pretty funny, especially in the episode where he magically transforms himself into Shakira (of course he belly dances, everybody belly dances).
But he probably won't talk about any of that and will instead concentrate on his role in The Goldbergs, which, since I never watch network TV either, I haven't seen. I'm sure he's very funny.
I had the distinct pleasure of being around for all of poblano's career here on Daily Kos. I must admit he wasn't my favorite author, not because I had any particular beef with him but because I just wasn't interested in his subject matter.
You see I find electoral horse race diaries dull beyond description and am much more interested in policy and good governance than the politics of personality.
Still, he's an interesting case study. When he came here he was a sports statistician and a proponent of the then novel Sabermetrics system of analysis. His particular contention was that the same techniques could be applied to political polling and give you a quite accurate prediction of the outcome of any given contest.
Some people were offended by his results since their perceptions were rose tinted by wishful thinking and at times discussion in poblano's diaries became quite heated. When he came out as Nate Silver and got picked up (along with his blog FiveThirtyEight which I feel was established partly as a reaction to his reception here) by The New York Times I'm sure he was not sorry to shake the dust off and go.
During the 2012 election cycle kos followed Nate's predictions quite closely and with good reason as he has a remarkable record of success-
The accuracy of his November 2008 presidential election predictions—he correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states—won Silver further attention and commendation. The only state he missed was Indiana, which went for Barack Obama by one percentage point. He correctly predicted the winner of all 35 U.S. Senate races that year.
...
In the 2012 United States presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, he correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. That same year, Silver's predictions of U.S. Senate races were correct in 31 of 33 states; he predicted Republican victory in North Dakota and Montana, where Democrats won.
Of course
kos got results nearly as good by simple poll averaging, no complicated weighting required.
In July of last year Nate picked up his site and moved to ESPN where, while he still talks about politics, he is much more sports focused. I expect we'll get a XLVIII prediction and I'd think twice or three times maybe before I bet against it.
The rest of this week's guests are-
The Daily Show
* Tuesday 1/28: Louis C.K.
* Wednesday 1/29: Johnny Knoxville
* Thursday 1/30: Rep. Nancy Pelosi
The Colbert Report
* Tuesday 1/28: Justin Tuck
* Wednesday 1/29: Cris Carter
* Thursday 1/30: Drew Brees