Roll Call: Post: Fill & Download for Free

One hot summer day in Texas I was acting as driver for the three-year-olds. We returned from a field trip and I parked close to the building as per policy. I went around to the sliding door and began lifting children down, while their teacher helped kids undo seat-belts. Per school policy the director came out and gathered children around her to take roll with the teacher, checking faces to the names on the roll call list before accompanying them safely back to class.I went to the van when the teacher joined the group with director and began completing the lengthy post-trip check list, as per policy. We had to write down mileage and if van ran okay and a few other things. I was hot and tired and kind of thought the center’s policies were overkill. I looked up and noticed the class I’d driven had been taken inside.The last item on the list before moving the van to a space farther out in parking lot to was walk the van, checking seat by seat that windows had been closed and locked and no belongings left behind. When I got to the last row I changed my mind about that center’s policies because a beautiful little boy with very pink cheeks was lying down, sound asleep on the seat.I went cold in the heat as I undid his seat belt and picked him up. He opened his eyes and said my name before snuggling into my neck and going back to sleep. There was no way this should have been possible but that didn’t change the fact we had come awfully close to killing the child sleeping in my arms.When I came in the front door of the center the director was just returning to her office after walking the 3’s safely to class. When she saw me she mouthed “Oh my god” and came to touch him. We grabbed the roll sheet, trying to figure out how it happened so we could prevent it ever happening again.It was a terrible set of coincidences. We had two Lukes in that class with the same last initial. The one I still couldn’t bring myself to let go of had been with us on the field trip. The second Luke had come late and his mom left him with his class during roll call. The director looked at name and initial, and counted heads. It all tallied up… We started using full names on roll call and I never left a van without checking the seats, no matter what policies the center I worked for had.

Military units will typically have a roll call at the start of every day.Answer to your name and you get paid and fed for the day. Depending on who is doing the roll call, “answer to your name” might be full name and rank, or just a total count of the number present which is then compared to the muster book.So at the start of the day during which a battle is fought, Jackson Company’s muster book might show 231 efective (i.e. mobile enough to carry a gun and fight), 19 sick, 2 leave, 3 AWOL.There would be a second roll call after the battle — either when the bullets stop flying, or the next morning.For Jackson Company, if they were on the winning side, the numbers might be 61 efective, 80 wounded, 67 confirmed dead (i.e. body sighted and identified before it was burried), 23 missing (which may or may not be broken down into missing presumed dead and just plain missing in action), 18 sick (one of yesterday’s sick has died), 2 leave, 3 AWOL.However, if Jackson Company was on the losing side, then the post battle muster would more likely be 61 effective, 60 wounded, 30 confirmed dead, 80 missing in action, 18 sick, 2 leave, 3 AWOL. The missing in action number includes those not confirmed as dead, those captured, those who have run away from the battle, and, particularly in WW1, those blown apart or buried in the mud during the battle.so “missing” includes those who ran away, those not confirmed as dead (in the Civil War, there was no obligation on commanders to identify enemy dead), those captured who subsequently died or changed sides, those blown to pieces during the battle, etc.

Nobody has done more work to quantify left-wing vs. right-wing in the U.S. House and Senate than the political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal. They developed a scale called DW-NOMINATE to sort everyone who has ever served in the House or Senate on a left-to-right scale, stretching all the way back to the post-Civil War period. (For example, I used the data from this scale to answer the question, Was Tom Foley the least partisan Speaker of the House in American history? And did that make him less effective?)Placing the U.S. Presidents on the DW-NOMINATE scale is harder than sorting Senators and members of Congress, because the president as the head of the executive branch doesn't vote on legislation the way that the House or the Senate does. Instead, Poole and Rosenthal used a collection of 282 statements that Obama made in support or opposition of legislation before Congress during his first term. By treating these statements by Obama as the equivalent of a Congressional voting record, it becomes possible to place President Obama on a left-right scale with all other U.S. presidents of the postwar era.Poole and Rosenthal then plotted their results as a square wave that depicts the left-right shifts of the presidency since Harry Truman took office in 1945.Based on this data, Poole and Rosenthal concluded, "President Obama is the most ideologically moderate Democratic president in the post-war period, with a first dimension DW-NOMINATE Common Space score of -0.329. President Lyndon Johnson, the second-most moderate Democratic president in this period, has a score of -0.345." Although this finding may seem counterintuitive to Republican partisans, Poole and Rosenthal state:Our results may seem surprising to those who consider President Obama among the most — even the most — liberal president of the post-war era. We would respond with a couple of observations. First, President Obama has tacked to the right on many national security and foreign policy issues. For example, President Obama — who once opposed FISA (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ) — recently supported and signed legislation a five-year extension of the program. Drone strikes — certainly not a source of liberal enthusiasm, even if vocal opposition from the left has been absent under President Obama — have been central to foreign policy during the Obama administration. Furthermore, while foreign policy issues come up relatively infrequently in congressional roll call voting, they constitute a greater proportion of the votes on which the president (i.e., the commander in chief) announces a position.Second, personal or symbolic factors are not captured in roll call data. DW-NOMINATE scores are estimated only from roll call voting records, and so perceptions of President Obama — for instance — that he is a polarizing president or is aloof towards Republicans are not considered (though, of course, because congressional Republicans have become increasingly conservative, a wide policy distance from them does not necessitate strident liberalism).There is a wide ideological gulf between Obama and Congressional Republicans, but that has more to do with the rightward movement of the GOP than any lack of centrism on Obama's part.Source: An Update on the Presidential Square WaveP.S. Sad to say, but drones are "centrist" policy by this measurement, because it is one of the few policies that can get bipartisan support in Congress. This is why I do not necessarily assume centrist = good.