Cosponsorship, the act of registering one’s name as an official supporter of a bill, is a common activity in the United States Senate. Although the 111th Congress is less than two months old, 1753 cosponsorships for 495 Senate Bills and 11 Senate Joint Resolutions have been officially registered. That’s an average of 3 cosponsorships per bill, which may not sound like much for a body with 99 members, but there’s actually a fair amount of variation from that mean, with 180 bills having no cosponsors and one bill (the successfully passed Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act) gaining 54 cosponsors.

Cosponsorship is an important behavior not only because it is associated with the likelihood of a bill’s passage out of committee and on to floor consideration (see Wilson and Young 1997: Legislative Studies Quarterly 12:25-43), but also because it can give us a glimpse into patterns of support for a wide variety of bills. If we only reference roll call votes to characterize patterns of legislative support, then we’re getting a biased picture, missing a majority of the activity that goes on in the Senate. Most bills never get a roll call vote; by studying cosponsorship we can get detailed information regarding patterns of cooperation on issues small and large, popular and unpopular.

At That’s My Congress we’ve been looking at which members of Congress have been more or less active in cosponsorship on an individual basis, but cosponsorship is more than an individual act. It is at least potentially part of a social bandwagon effort to build congressional coalitions for a bill. Advocacy groups certainly speak of cosponsorship this way in their legislative activism. But even if cosponsorship were to be a solitary act based on independent rational calculus, it would be relational in the sense that the similarity of patterns of cosponsorship between two members of Congress indicates the similarity of their policy priorities. Cosponsorship networks — whether they model social ties, policy similarity, or both — are an important object of study.

Perhaps the most intuitive way to measure ties between two Senators in a cosponsorship network is as the number of bills which both Senators have measured. Below is a matrix showing the cosponsorship network of Alaska Senator Mark Begich, California Senator Barbara Boxer, Delaware Senator Ted Kaufman and Arizona Senator Jon Kyl. Data is valid for all Senate bills with a prefix of S. or S.J. Res. (leaving out the procedural Senate Resolutions and Concurrent Resolutions) through March 1, 2009:

Across any row, the number of shared cosponsorships is a good indicator of the behavioral similarity of various pairs of Senators. The maximum value for any row is on the “diagonal,” the cell in which a Senator is compared to himself or herself. In the language of the specified relation, we could awkwardly say that Senator Mark Begich has cosponsored 26 bills that Senator Mark Begich has also cosponsored — or we could say in plain English that Senator Mark Begich has cosponsored 26 bills. In this set, Senator Begich’s behavior is most similar to Senator Boxer’s, with the two cosponsoring 16 of the same bills. Senators Begich and Kaufman have only cosponsored one bill together, while Senators Begich and Kyl have nothing in common.

But what happens if we want to make a comparisons between rows? We know, for instance, that the Senators Begich and Kaufman have cosponsored just one bill in common, and that Senators Boxer and Kyl have cosponsored just one bill in common as well. But looking down the diagonal we know that the overall levels of cosponsorship varies from Senator to Senator: 26 for Begich, 42 for Boxer, 5 bills for Kaufman and 15 bills for Kyl. You could argue that the shared cosponsorship of 1 bill between Begich and Kaufman is more meaningful for Kaufman than it the shared cosponsorship of 1 bill between Boxer and Kyl. For Barbara Boxer, that’s just one bill out of 42, but for Ted Kaufman it’s one bill out of five. Oddly enough, the very same number of shared bills between Senators Boxer and Begich — 16 — means something different from each Senator’s perspective. 62% of the bills Mark Begich has cosponsored (16/26) are also Boxer bills, while 38% of the bills Barbara Boxer has cosponsored are also Begich bills. The share of Boxer-type bills in Begich’s cosponsorship profile is lower than the share of Begich-type bills in Boxer’s cosponsorship profile… but the raw numbers don’t tell you that.

To create a standard measure that has the same meaning across all pairs of senators, we can use Pearson’s product moment correlation for each pair of Senators instead. To find Pearson’s correlation between two Senators X and Y here’s what we’ll do:

1. For every one of the 506 Senate bills introduced as of today i, ask the dichotomous questions, “Has Senator X cosponsored bill i?” and “Has Senator Y cosponsored bill i?” We’ll call the answer to the first question Xi and the answer to the second question Yi, and give each a value of 1 if the answer is “yes” and a value of 0 if the answer is “no.”

2. Why a 0-1 variable? One reason is that the mean of Xi for all 506 i Senate bills is equal to the proportion (or, when multiplied by 100, the percentage) of all of the bills that Senator X has cosponsored.

3. Now for each bill i, we’ll subtract the mean of Xi (for all bills) from Xi (this particular bill). That’s called the “deviation” from the mean, and the result is positive if cosponsorship happens and negative if cosponsorship doesn’t happen. We’ll do the same thing for Yi and the mean of Yi to obtain the deviation for Senator Y.

4. Then we’ll multiply the deviation for Senator X on bill i times the deviation for Senator Y on bill i. Why? Well, remember that a positive deviation occurs when cosponsorship of bill i has happened, and that a negative deviation means cosponsorship of bill i hasn’t happened. A positive deviation for X, multiplied by a positive deviation for Y, gives us a positive result. So when both Senator X and Senator Y cosponsor, we get a positive number. How about when both don’t cosponsor? Well, then we get a positive number too. But when Senator X cosponsors and Senator Y doesn’t (or when Senator Y cosponsors and Senator X doesn’t), we’ll multiply a positive number and a negative number, which always gives us a negative number. The end result of all this is a positive number if Senators X and Y do the same thing regarding bill i, and a negative number if they do different things regarding bill i.

5. We’ll do that same calculation over and over again, once for every one of the 506 Senate bills existing as of today. The result is that we’ll have 506 numbers for the 506 bills. Some of the bills will be positive (when Senators X and Y do the same thing), and some of them will be negative (when Senators X and Y do different things).

6. Now add all of those numbers up. If Senators X and Y tend to do the same thing regarding cosponsorship of bills more often than they differ, the sum of all those numbers will be positive. If Senators X and Y tend to diverge in their cosponsorship choice more often, the sum will be negative. If the sum is zero, then that tells you Senators X and Y differ as often as they do the same thing.

7. Here’s where I wave my hands a bit: dividing this result by the product of {the number of bills, the standard deviation of all Xi and the standard deviation of all Yi} standardizes the result so that the biggest possible positive value is 1 and the biggest possible negative value is -1. That’s so the value of the result can be interpreted the same way, no matter how many bills Senator X or Senator Y cosponsored overall.

8. Do this for all possible pairs of Senators, and you’ll have a number for every pair of Senators telling you whether the pair acts the same way regarding a bill more often than the pair acts divergently (a positive correlation) or whether the pair acts divergently more often than it acts the same way (a negative correlation).

So I did that. Rather, I had my computer do that, using a PHP program to access current reports on congressional bills via the online Thomas system and the awesome network analysis program called UCINET to run calculations.

Want to see the results? I could put them in a matrix, just as I did above, but then I’d have 99 rows and 99 columns for the 99 Senators currently seated, with 9,801 number-filled cells. How’d you like to interpret that? Blech. I sure wouldn’t, and besides, the table wouldn’t fit on your screen. Our eyes are simply better at perceiving patterns when they’re presented in the form of a picture, and our technologies are designed better to show such pictures. Pictures of relational data are called sociograms, and they work like this:

1. Every Senator is a dot.
2. Every relationship between two Senators (that meets some standard) is a line between the dots.
3. That’s it.
4. No, really, that’s it.

Let’s look at sociograms of those cosponsorship correlations between United States Senators for the 111th Congress so far. The ones you see below are generated using Netdraw.

There are two ways we can go with a sociogram. One is to look at a particular member of the Senate and to use the space of the sociogram to describe every other Senator’s relationship to that focal senator. Here’s just such a sociogram featuring Senator Mark Begich:

This form, the sociometric star, features shorter ties for higher correlations between Senators, since those indicate closer behavioral agreement. I’ve pulled aside the Senators who share absolutely no common cosponsorships with Begich. You’ll see they’re coded in blue and feature no line connecting them to Begich since they are wholly unconnected with Begich when it comes to supporting legislation in the Senate. Such unconnected individuals are called “isolates.”

The other sort of sociogram we can use draws a tie between two Senators when the strength of connection between them meets a certain threshold. In order to show relationships of strong correspondence between senators, correlations of positive 0.33 or greater merit a tie in the sociogram below:

One of the nice things about sociograms is that you can use graphic elements to display additional information. Here, I’ve given Republican senators the color red, Democratic senators the color blue, and Independent senators the color green. And finally, here at the end of our investigation, we can begin to address the assumptions behind those classic political colors. Most news reports on the Congress don’t go beyond such ideas of partisanship in describing the political coalitions in the Senate. Reporters will make blanket statements like “Republicans in the Senate are close to having no voice whatsoever” and references to “the growing strength of Democrats in the Senate”, but we don’t have to assume that the Senate is organized on a strictly partisan basis. Instead, without making any judgment about partisanship, we can look at the actual pattern of cooperation in cosponsorship and see what patterns naturally emerge.

In this sociogram, members of the Senate are made to appear close to one another not because they are members of the same political party, but because of strong cosponsorship bonds they share. Cliques of three, four, six, even ten senators are visible as well, groups within which all senators have a strong record of supporting the same sort of bills. These cliques do not encompass all members of a political party, but rather occur inside them. Senators Kay Hagan, Mark Warner, Ted Kaufman and James Webb form a strong Chesapeake-Carolina coalition of junior senators, but none of them have a strong tendency toward supporting the bills favored by a bigger clique of more senior Democratic senators including Barbara Boxer, John Kerry, Dick Durbin, Barbara Mikulski and Chuck Schumer (among many others). Conservative Senators Lindsey Graham, Johnny Isakson and Robert Bennett have a strong record of cooperation in their support of bills, but do not appear to be coordinating strongly with other conservatives like Sam Brownback or John Ensign.

That said, there’s a split in this cosponsorship network that is undeniable. All of the Republicans who have any strong correlations with other senators have those strong correlations only to other Republicans. All of the Democrats having any strong correlations in cosponsorship with other senators have those strong correlations only to other Democrats. That doesn’t look bipartisan, does it?

Well, looks may be deceiving. Yes, there are large groups of Senators whose support for bills isn’t strongly bipartisan. But remember that ties are reported only above a certain threshold of co-operation. There may be weak bipartisanship among many of these senators happening on an occasional basis. And look again at the sociogram. There are 24 senators who appear as “isolates” because they do not have a strong correlation in their pattern of bill cosponsorship with any other senator. Some of these senators, like Richard Shelby and Michael Bennet, appear as isolates because, frankly, they’re not doing much of anything but marking time and enjoying the Capitol Hill cafeteria.

But other “isolates” have earned low correlations with other senators not for their inactivity but for their high level of independent, eclectic activity. Senator John McCain, for instance, has not only introduced a number of his own bills but has cosponsored a number of bills written by and supported largely by Senate Democrats, Democrats as fiercely liberal as Russell Feingold. These cosponsorships have the effect of canceling out cosponsorships shared with fiercely conservative senators like Jim DeMint, giving John McCain a strong correlation with the cosponsorship record of no one else. That makes McCain, yes, a Maverick. It gives him weak behavioral ties to others. But these are, putting substantive judgment aside, bridging ties, ties connecting parts of the Senate in ways that the more insular ties of strictly liberal or conservative senators don’t.

There’s a lot to uncover in these cosponsorship networks, and a lot to explain as well. Look for more updates, information and analysis of congressional cosponsorship from Irregular Times and That’s My Congress.

For about a year now, I’ve been volunteering at a local elementary school to teach chess to kids in the 2nd through 5th grade. Over that time I’ve come to realize that teaching young children is not at all like teaching an adult. I could tell you that a knight moves either two squares horizontally and one square vertically, or two squares vertically and one square horizontally, jumping over other pieces during the move, and only capturing on the last square. You might need me to repeat that once or twice, or perhaps show you one example, but then you’d remember the move and be ready to move forward in about a minute’s time. You’d pick this move up quickly, but most kids need a lot of repetition and practice to remember a move as complicated as the shape of the letter “L.”

There are loads of chess curricula and lesson plans available for purchase that can help you teach the moves and strategies of chess, and they usually come at a pretty steep price; First Move, for instance, charges more than five hundred dollars per classroom for their clever ideas. I tip my king at that kind of expense personally, and the school at which I’m volunteering isn’t that resource-rich. Todd Barstow’s Teaching Chess in the 21st Century is a more affordable guide (at about $15) with handy strategies for incorporating mathematics instruction, but even with this book and Murray Chandler’s charming Chess for Children, I still find myself looking for more ways to help kids who are eager but a bit more slow on the uptake practice their moves.

Today I gave the kids a game I’ve drawn up called Chess Bingo. It’s a pretty simple exercise, but I found it to be effective. Each student gets a sheet of paper with a chess board printed on it, complete with the letter-number system for identifying ranks, files and individual squares. Click on the thumbnail for a sample:

Chess Bingo Sheet: Rook at d4

Just as different regular bingo boards contain different sets of numbers placed under different letters, so different chess bingo sheets have different chess pieces placed in different locations. As an instructor reads out the positions of individual chess squares (”a4″… “e7″), students cross out those positions if the chess piece (or pieces) placed on their board could move to that position in one turn. A student wins the Chess Bingo game by crossing out all the positions to which the pieces on his/her board could possibly move in one turn. (In the sample sheet above, that set of positions is a4, b4, c4, e4, f4, g4, h4, d1, d2, d3, d5, d6, d7, d8.) When a student calls out “Bingo!” play pauses for the instructor to check the student’s work for accuracy and completeness. To turn this into a learning moment for the whole class, reproduce the student’s sheet and responses on a demonstration board (or by using an opaque projector) and ask the rest of the class to evaluate it.

By playing Chess Bingo, students practice three chess skills: referring to positions by location, learning the moves of pieces and … learning that as in life, chess is not fair. As more and more students win Chess Bingo and share their work with the rest of the class), smart students will object: “Tina didn’t have to fill in as many squares to win as I did!” Turn the outrage into insight: what pieces tend to have more squares to which they can move? These are the more powerful pieces (think Queen). When pieces are placed on what squares do they tend to have more possible destinations? These are the more powerful locations (think middle of the board). Students will learn that in chess power comes from opportunity, that power can be quantified, and that it’s unevenly distributed. Chess starts to sound like a PoliSci class, which isn’t surprising considering the origin of the game.

If you find yourself working with an elementary chess club in a resource-poor school, I hope you find this Chess Bingo exercise to be of some use. Below are some links to some Chess Bingo sheets in png format:

Chess Bingo sheet 1
Chess Bingo sheet 2
Chess Bingo sheet 3
Chess Bingo sheet 4
Chess Bingo sheet 5
Chess Bingo sheet 6
Chess Bingo sheet 7
Chess Bingo sheet 8
Chess Bingo sheet 9
Chess Bingo sheet 10
Chess Bingo sheet 11

This is your last chance! In case you somehow slept through all three general election debates, dozens of candidate forums and scores of primary-round debates, tonight’s debate at 9 pm Eastern is your last chance to see the candidates for the 2008 presidential election spar on the issues that matter most for our nation’s future… or not. Are the debates a chance for Americans to learn more about the candidates’ platforms and plans for the nation, or are they a chance for us all to watch a fight and gain vicarious enjoyment from the digs, the punches and the occasional toss of sand in the eye?

You tell me. Here are two Obama-McCain presidential debate bingo cards for you to use tonight. You know the rules: five across, five down or five diagonally in a row and you win. The two cards are filled with words and phrases with a varying likelihood of being propelled out of a candidate’s mouth. Can you guess which of the two cards will be the winner?

If you actually want a close contest, use these blanks and write in your own phrases and subjects.

Tonight the First Presidential Debate between John McCain and Barack Obama will be aired on TV at 9 PM on just about all the network news stations, and we are all prepared to …

… to what? Learn something new? You know, the differences between Obama and McCain are pretty clear to those who’ve been paying attention. Chances are the two candidates aren’t going to be releasing any brand spanking new policy proposals on the stage in Mississippi tonight. Then again, four days ago I wouldn’t have guessed that John McCain would have suspended and restarted his campaign within 48 hours’ time. Who knows what we’ll see? Maybe Barack Obama will spit out an epithet. Maybe John McCain will reveal that he’s a Muslim.

While we watch, let’s have fun. Below are three printable Obama-McCain Debate Bingo cards filled with words and phrases with a varying likelihood of being propelled out of a candidate’s mouth tonight. You know the rules: five across, five down or five diagonally in a row and you win. Win what? That’s up to you. I don’t suggest turning it into a drinking game, though, unless you have a high tolerance for alcohol. I expect these phrases to be turning up quite a bit, and you wouldn’t want to be so drunk that you didn’t catch every last catchphrase or soundbite or veiled insult, would you? Hmm. Okay, go ahead and turn it into a drinking game if you like.

And here’s a blank playing card for you to write in your own favorite debate catchphrases…

As “part of a regime of daily activities to keep my brain limber,” which is my excuse for “fun,” I like to work on kakuro puzzles. Kakuro is the name of a paper puzzle that’s like Sudoku on steroids. As with Sudoku, a grid must be filled with the numbers 1-9 without repetition in every row or column. Kakuro adds new wrinkles: columns and rows can be less than 9 spaces long, meaning that some numbers between 1 and 9 will be left out. Which numbers will be left out of a row or column? You have to figure that out, given one new piece of information: the sum total that each of the rows or columns has to add up to.

If you’re given two blanks and they have to add up to 16, that’s easy: 9 and 7 are the only two (non-repeating) numbers between 1 and 9 that add up to 16. If you’re given four blanks and they have to add up to 16, that’s trickier. A kakuro puzzle overall can be simpler or trickier by including more of the simpler solutions or more of the tricker solutions.

Having played kakuro for a while, I look forward to the more devilishly difficult kakuro puzzles. I thought I’d find that in the collection of Kakuro by Johnny Wong. It advertised four sets of puzzle difficulties: beginner, intermediate, advanced and “extreme.” I started from the back, which is where Johnny Wong’s “extreme” kakuro puzzles were located. Sadly, these puzzles were only mildly difficult, as mildly difficult as pepper jack cheese is mildly spicy. This book heads to my eight-year-old son, who is starting off with the beginner puzzles, which are great for someone still nailing down his addition skills. But Johnny Wong’s Kakuro book isn’t what I was looking for.

If you’re looking for kakuro puzzles that will not only kick your ass but grind it into fine meaty bits and stuff it into sausage casing, I suggest that you try The Kakuro Challenge with puzzles by Peter Gordon. As often as not, I find that I cannot successfully complete the puzzles, and I wrinkle my forehead in frustrated despair. That’s the way I like it, because when I do succeed in finishing one of Gordon’s kakuros, I feel a wave of elation.

If you are looking for comfort puzzling (or are just starting with kakuros), you can’t go wrong with Wong. But if you’ve been doing kakuros for a while and are looking for some really tricky puzzles, get Gordon.

Can you meet this challenge? Or, as I suspect, is there actually no difference at all?

Tonight the Democratic Presidential Debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will be aired on TV on ABC at 8 PM, and we are all prepared to…

… to what? Learn something new? Maybe if we’re just emerging out of a coma. Otherwise, if you’re at all politically curious, you’ve had more than twenty chances to see debates within the past year featuring Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Chances are the two candidates aren’t going to be releasing any brand spanking new policy proposals on the stage in Philadelphia tonight. The most you’ll see is some stylistic sparring. So go ahead, treat it like the entertainment it will be and have some fun.

Below are three printable Democratic Debate Bingo cards filled with words and phrases with a varying likelihood of being propelled out of a candidate’s mouth tonight. You know the rules: five across, five down or five diagonally in a row and you win. Win what? That’s up to you. I don’t suggest turning it into a drinking game, though, unless you have a high tolerance for alcohol. I expect these phrases to be turning up quite a bit, and you wouldn’t want to be so drunk that you didn’t catch every last veiled insult, would you? Hmm. Okay, go ahead and turn it into a drinking game if you like.

And here’s a blank playing card for you to write in your own favorite debate catchphrases…

Despite protestations to the contrary by Unity08 staffers, Unity08 did not shut down when it and the Draft Bloomberg committee shared the same business address. It’s not just that the Unity08.com website itself said that Unity08 was “forced to scale back - not cease - our operations.” Unity08 has had its lawyers file a motion to expedite consideration of its lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission — a lawsuit to grant Unity08 the right to take campaign contributions of unlimited size and unlimited loans with undisclosed terms.

This latest motion filed by Unity08 asks DC circuit Judge Richard W. Roberts “for expedited consideration of the crossmotions for summary judgment in this case that are now pending before it.” In other words, Unity08 is asking Judge Roberts to hurry the hell up and get his work done. I sympathize with Unity08 on this point: the incorporated organization filed its lawsuit nearly a year and two months ago, and its last susbstantial filing was in May of 2007. The case is not immensely complicated and it is time-dependent. Yet Judge Roberts and his staff have sat on their hands and issued no rulings in the case since last summer. Roberts owes Unity08 and those who supported it an explanation for his tardiness; his inattention has potentially impacted a presidential election.

While I have procedural sympathy for Unity08, I have no substantive sympathy for it. The plan, says Unity08, was to seek “to obtain from certain supporters loans of $100,000 or more.” The funny thing is, a very large majority of the contributions obtained by Unity08 did indeed come in the form of such large loans (with mysteriously undisclosed terms). So if Unity08 was already taking in these big megaloans, why was it filing a lawsuit?

Unity08 explains in its latest filing:

A number of individuals otherwise prepared to make loans in these larger amounts have been unwilling to do so because of the Commission’s ruling… A favorable ruling in the near term may make it possible to revive Unity08 through substantial loans from those individuals who have expressed a willingness to make such loans but not in the face of legal uncertainty about their exposure to possible liability for doing so.

Oh! So Unity08 wants to take on even more megaloans from wealthy donors it has lined up to fund a presidential bid, making its effort to win for some unnamed person the rulership of the nation even more heavily funded by the very, very rich…

… because, you know, it’s not like a presidential bid can soar, raking in nearly $30 million in cash in just one month’s time when some 90 percent of donors give $100 or less to the campaign.

Oh, wait, yes it is. Yes, it is exactly like that, as a matter of fact.

If Unity08 had been as electrifying as Barack Obama has been to the nation, it would have had no trouble meeting its monetary needs. Unity08 had lots of opportunities with cable news and national newspapers and national magazines and late-night TV shows to make its pitch. Unity08 had a lot of opportunities to catch on. The American people rejected the message and tactics of Unity08. That is why Unity08 has been a miserable failure.

I’ve been playing with a software package I got for Christmas called Mind Quiz. The program is a clunky attempt to capitalize on the “stretch-your-mind-with-puzzles” craze that’s sweeping the nation like an overcharged Roomba. I have never been able to get the sound on Mind Quiz to work. I can’t manually adjust levels for certain sorts of puzzles to make them harder. Little on-screen buttons like “pass” appear unexplained in the middle of puzzles I’m working on that turn out to mean “capitulate,” since pressing such buttons causes you to automatically end the puzzle rather than set it aside as “pass” might seem to suggest. MindQuiz maker Ubisoft really needs to rework the structure of this puzzle package.

After playing a few rounds it’s become apparent that Ubisoft needs to rework the content, too. The “right” answers can be so arbitrarily defined as to drive one mad. For instance, in one round of an anagram game, the solution “River Rhine” is deemed correct, but the solution “Rhine River” merits an irredeemable incorrect mark. Yet later on in the same round, the “Yangtze River” is deemed correct while the “River Yangtze” would be incorrect. These kind of inconsistencies are especially irksome in a computer program designed to hone thinking skills.

To solve this puzzle, fill in the grid below so that every row, column, and smaller 3×3 box displays each of the following letters once and only once:

A C E F I L N O R

Clue: Appearing in this sudoku grid is the maximum punishment under U.S. Code Title 18 Section 2340 for a person in government authority who conspires to commit an act that includes the threat of imminent death.

To solve this puzzle, fill in the grid below so that every row, column, and smaller 3×3 box displays each of the following letters once and only once:

A D E K O M S U Y

Clue: Appearing in this sudoku grid is the last name of the person who stated before Congress that the President can disobey a law if the law restricts “the authority of the President to defend the country.”

Since November of 2004, we have been tracking the number of bumper stickers, magnets, campaign buttons and shirts that we sell in support for each of the Democratic candidates in the 2008 presidential race. While polls measure opinions of the moment, our measure tracks a more strong and lasting and lasting commitment to show their support for a particular candidate in a public way. That kind of strong commitment turns into donations, and later turns into votes. The following is the percent share of sales of our Election 2008 gear in the past week of June 17-23, for each candidate who garnered at least a 1% share of sales:

Al Gore: 34.2% (previous week: 31.6%)
Barack Obama: 28.9% (previous week: 29.5%)
Hillary Clinton: 14.8% (previous week: 15.9%)
Bill Richardson: 10.9% (previous week: 10.6%)
John Edwards: 5.3% (previous week: 4.4%)
Dennis Kucinich: 2.8% (previous week: 2.7%)
Joseph Biden: 1.1% (previous week: 2.7%)

Neither Christopher Dodd nor Mike Gravel managed to garner a 1% share this past week.

Now there’s a name: they’re calling it Wordoku. As in Bible Wordoku, Weekly Bible Wordoku, and … oh, dear, someone needs to stake a secular wordoku claim, no? Well, whatever you call it, it’s time for another liberal political sudoku, the logic puzzle with a hidden word and a meaningful clue.

Click here for a printable version of the twenty-first in Irregular Times’ ongoing series of liberal political sudoku. As in classic sudoku, the object of liberal sudoku is to fill in a 9×9 grid so that each member of a set of nine symbols appears once and only once in each column, once in each row, and once in each of nine smaller 3×3 sub-boxes. The twist with our political sudoku is to replace the numbers 1-9 with a set of nine letters. At the bottom of the puzzle is a clue, hinting at a name, a word, or a phrase related to liberal politics that appears in one of the rows or columns of the puzzle. Using the clue in combination with rules of logic, you should be able to fill in all the boxes and find the one possible solution.

If you need a bit of additional help solving the puzzle, here’s a clue: Appearing in this sudoku grid is the last name of the person who said this year on national television that “All of the science since 1999 has repudiated the idea that global warming caused by man-made gases — that’s methane and Co2- - is causing a global warming, and the end of the world is coming, and the icecap is going to melt and all these things.”

Our newest liberal sudoku puzzle is ready for you to print out and solve. Go to it!

Click here for a printable version of the twentieth in Irregular Times’ ongoing series of liberal political sudoku. As in classic sudoku, the object of liberal sudoku is to fill in a 9×9 grid so that each member of a set of nine symbols appears once and only once in each column, once in each row, and once in each of nine smaller 3×3 sub-boxes. The twist with our political sudoku is to replace the numbers 1-9 with a set of nine letters. At the bottom of the puzzle is a clue, hinting at a name, a word, or a phrase related to liberalism that appears in one of the rows or columns of the puzzle. Using the clue in combination with rules of logic, you should be able to fill in all the boxes and find the one possible solution.

If you need a bit of additional help solving the puzzle, here’s a clue: Appearing in this sudoku grid is the last name of a person whose nonprofit foundations were used as a conduit to shuffle money from casino industry lobbyist Jack Abramoff to Republican politicians.

Most of the political sudokus here at Irregular Times are at a moderate difficulty level. But just this morning I’ve made done a little influence peddling of my own and ensured that this puzzle is at an easy level, for beginner sudoku solvers. This is a good puzzle to try out if you’re new to sudoku.

Our newest liberal sudoku puzzle is ready for you to print out and solve. Go to it!