Prelude to the Apocalypse

[BryanM]

The 2004 chart indicates only one thing: Bush is a more likable person and better politician than Kerry. The unanswered swiftboating had some effect sure; Bush certainly didn't make Kerry do things like mention Cheney's lesbo daughter. That beautiful bit of harikari was all John's whizbang idea. You could run that same election 20 times groundhog day style, and Bush would win almost all of them.

All the current polling says to me is the republican primary is a beauty pageant to find the worst person in the world. Six months (six eternities) and all the crazy etch-a-sketch's itself away. And democrat partisans will have to ask themselves why the hell would they waste their time voting for the lady who protected a rapist, voted for the Iraq war, wants a war with Iran, doesn't want publicly funded elections, and doesn't want universal healthcare. (This is assuming she isn't indicted on corruption and other wonderful charges.)

Trump is a buffoon and might somehow blow this very easy win for himself. But he does seem to have a handle on basic A/B testing. I have some confidence in his chances of not being a total fuckup.

[EmperorIng]

I won't try to explain away the Bush-Kerry campaign chart

Easy: As BryanM mentioned, Kerry was such a failure of a politician, and possibly as a person, that he couldn't even muster the support to oust GWB. One of those rare men who get on a national stage and offer no ideas or imagination whatsoever*. I think history has proven the voters right on this judgment, considering the man's incredible ability to be a total disaster as Secretary of State. Maybe we dodged a bullet avoiding 4-8 years of his blundering. Although it does provide an abject lesson, much like the "Anybody but Carter" campaign (and now the "NeverTrump" campaign), that a candidate whose entire platform is described as "anti-[the other guy]" usually fizzles out in the end.

Unfortunately for Clinton, her campaign lacks ideas or imagination as well, which has shown in how hard it has been for her to get people to, well, like her. It's a dangerous spot, politically, when you are entirely defined by the nature of your opposition, on top of being defined by the opposition.

*you can see the same phenomenon when you see that Wasserman-Schulz lady speak on TV. A total void of human intellect. Her most memorable moment was spending an entire CNN interview obsessing over Trump's dick.

[BulletMagnet]

And democrat partisans will have to ask themselves why the hell would they waste their time voting for the lady who protected a rapist, voted for the Iraq war, wants a war with Iran, doesn't want publicly funded elections, and doesn't want universal healthcare.

As I said in an earlier post: because she can at least sometimes be shamed into acting in the country's best interests. Despite Trump supporters' insistence that what we really need in the Oval Office is someone who's so smart/bold/awesome as an individual that once he's there we can basically tune out and know that he will continue to be awesome ("stick to his principles") no matter what happens, in the real world said ubermensch doesn't exist, and the candidate who will end up doing the most for us is the one who will respond to regular, firm yanks on a very tight leash. It always strikes me how the Trump crowd are the ones sporting most of the various "all politicians are crooks" bumper stickers...y'know, except this guy, this time!

The problem, of course, is that average voters, after 40+ years of "government is always the problem, who cares, it doesn't matter" shysters that refuse to die (and a "liberal" establishment that refuses to take the fight to them), not to mention an orchestrated, accompanying shift of wealth and influence away from them, has largely disengaged from the process, and been all but replaced - surprise! - by the monied interests said shysters represent. Even so, if popular sentiment managed to scare the likes of Bush away from privatizing Social Security, it can scare Hillary away from the worst of her impulses; I have no such "confidence" in Trump, who has yet to even acknowledge the most hilariously blatant scams he's pulled, and continues to pull, insisting he can do no wrong no matter how awful the results (I also love how it's the "personal responsibility" crowd who loves the guy who takes absolutely none of it and never has - it's always, always someone else's fault).

[quash]

As I said in an earlier post: because she can at least sometimes be shamed into acting in the country's best interests.

I'm sure that'll come in handy after she instates a puppet regime in Syria that all but ensures WW3.

[antron]

the probability that Trump can catch up by November is 9%

And Bush was completely underground until the last minute in 2004.

Two things:
Your graph doesn't show bush completely underground. Looks like he was on top 50% of the time.

2004 in itself is anecdotal. The 9% chance from Sam Wang is based off all the polling and election results from the 1950's.

[Mischief Maker]

And democrat partisans will have to ask themselves why the hell would they waste their time voting for the lady who protected a rapist,

I know I said I don't want to defend Hillary until I absolutely have to, but this kind of shit is the rhetoric successfully used by the Koch brothers to stack the Wisconsin Supreme court.

Stop giving attorneys shit for fulfilling their duties to their clients. Hillary Clinton was on a list of attorneys available to represent low-income clients and was assigned that client. She did not have the option of pulling a "Cape Fear" and intentionally throwing his defense so the state could put a "due process" bow on his incarceration. What's more, I've worked on the Innocence Project and I have seen the absolute ruin made of innocent people's lives due to false incarceration, sometimes thanks to an incompetent defense attorney, even when they're accused of rape. Are you enjoying that "Making a Murderer" documentary on Netflix?

Our criminal justice system is deeply flawed, no doubt, but the solution is not attorneys fucking over their clients, even poor ones assigned to them. The prosecution has every advantage in the game. Juries are naturally disposed to see the district attorney as a public servant and the defense attorney as a hired mercenary. The DA can order the police to collect evidence for them at taxpayer expense, the defense has to hire a private investigator at the client's expense. In emotionally charged cases like rape, rules be damned the defendant is guilty until proven innocent in the jury's mind. There are prosecutors who go undefeated their entire lifetime career. There is no such thing as an undefeated defense attorney. I bear no ill-will to any defense attorney who does everything in their power to help their client because every criminal case is the DA's to lose.

I agree with Bernie Sanders' decision not to open gun manufacturers to liability due to misuse of their weapons. Even though it would have been emotionally vindicating after the Sandy Hook massacre, the legal ramifications of that course of action would have gone to the point of effectively making legal weapons illegal, the same kind of slimy tactics being used in the south to effectively make legal abortion services illegal. It's emotionally vindicating to say that an attorney who represents a reprehensible client is a bad person, but the legal ramifications of expecting defense attorneys to throw the case if they think their client is a bad guy would be destroyed lives.

Here is the full snopes analysis of that meme.

[Xyga]

this kind of shit is the rhetoric successfully used by the Koch brothers

lol politics though, read that the other day and almost spilled my beer;
http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-d ... nton/?_r=0
WHERE IS YOUR GOP NOW?

PS: real campaign soon to replace House of Cards on Netflix for sure. I love USA.

[BryanM]

this kind of shit is the rhetoric successfully used by the Koch brothers

lol politics though, read that the other day and almost spilled my beer;
http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-d ... nton/?_r=0
WHERE IS YOUR GOP NOW?

Yeah, that one makes me think of Ghostbusters, too.

"But Egon, you said that would be bad."

The candidate of choice of the Koch brothers AND the neocons. Fuck us.

[Mischief Maker]

this kind of shit is the rhetoric successfully used by the Koch brothers

lol politics though, read that the other day and almost spilled my beer;
http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-d ... nton/?_r=0
WHERE IS YOUR GOP NOW?

Yeah, that one makes me think of Ghostbusters, too.

"But Egon, you said that would be bad."

The candidate of choice of the Koch brothers AND the neocons. Fuck us.

The same article said she publicly rebuked the offer.

I think it speaks more to how fear of nukes in Trump's hands crosses party lines than any quality of Hillary's.

Clothespins for everyone this November!

[BulletMagnet]

I'm sure that'll come in handy after she instates a puppet regime in Syria that all but ensures WW3.

If World War 3 is really on your list of concerns, perhaps Trump's "we'll tear up any agreement/treaty the second it's no longer immediately convenient" and "more nukes for our allies of the moment" declarations should appear somewhere on your radar. Y'know, apart from the whole overarching "Hey! Rest of world! Screw you!" vibe.

And again, there's at least a chance of shaming Hillary out of some of her belligerence; Trump decides to hit the launch button after a bender, they'll have to chain him (not to mention his "you can totally trust him on this, he's just thought so far ahead nobody else can possibly understand" followers) up to prevent it from happening.

[quash]

I'm sure that'll come in handy after she instates a puppet regime in Syria that all but ensures WW3.

If World War 3 is really on your list of concerns, perhaps Trump's "we'll tear up any agreement/treaty the second it's no longer immediately convenient" and "more nukes for our allies of the moment" declarations should appear somewhere on your radar. Y'know, apart from the whole overarching "Hey! Rest of world! Screw you!" vibe.

And again, there's at least a chance of shaming Hillary out of some of her belligerence; Trump decides to hit the launch button after a bender, they'll have to chain him (not to mention his "you can totally trust him on this, he's just thought so far ahead nobody else can possibly understand" followers) up to prevent it from happening.

Trump wants to restore sovereignty to Syria, even if it means them not being our ally. He's even willing to coordinate with Putin to do it. Pretty sure that's the opposite of what you're saying.

Funny how foreign governments understand that Hillary is a wolf in sheep's clothing, but Americans are completely oblivious to it for the most part.

[Mischief Maker]

Here is a pretty good reason why the Koch bros. would support Hillary without any collusion between them.

[BulletMagnet]

Funny how foreign governments understand that Hillary is a wolf in sheep's clothing, but Americans are completely oblivious to it for the most part.

Considering that, just in the past two or three weeks, the Supah Dupah Librul New York Times had a cover article in its Sunday Magazine about how much of a hawk Hillary is (and also repeatedly parroted Trump's outright lie that he was against the Iraq war from the beginning, but that's another story), I don't think very many people, including supporters who don't agree with them (by way of contrast, how many in Trump's crowd know how massive a tax cut he wants to give to the rich, and how much it'll explode the national debt?) are unaware of the general nature of Clinton's foreign policy positions; if nothing else she's bothered to formalize and lay them out in the open, at least beyond general assertions of "we're gonna kick everyone's ass, it's gonna be great, yeeeaahhh".

Speaking of which, if by "return sovereignty to" you and Trump mean "support Assad", I'm not sure there's a particularly good option to be had in Syria...heaven knows that military intervention has come back to bite us in the backside more than once in recent years, but so has the "just ignore the brutal dictator as long as he's not bombing us at the moment" approach.

[Xyga]

Kind of OT but; I may live 1000Km away from London, I could swear I've heard this echoing through the sky yesterday http://youtu.be/ajsNJtnUb7c

[BryanM]

Golly gee whiz.

Who could have possibly seen this coming.

[quash]

Most people don't understand the meme magic Trump is pulling off daily. That "I love Hispanics!" tweet with his ex-wife's picture on the floor practically sealed the election.

[BulletMagnet]

Only if you equate fleeting entertainment with qualification for high office.

On a related note, I hope the "party of principle" gets hammered for how quickly they inevitably pivot from "we could never in a million years support such a candidate" to "eh, he'll keep slashing upper-end taxes, that's really all any country needs for greatness".

[EmperorIng]

Only if you equate fleeting entertainment with qualification for high office.

It sure as hell worked for Obama. Don't feel bad; we all got swept up in the magic back then too.

[BryanM]

Some rumors that she had her FBI interview yesterday.

Only if you equate fleeting entertainment with qualification for high office.

You make a good point for Trump.

Entertainment is a pivotal aspect of charisma. Bush II is a better politician than Kerry in part due to being someone more interesting to listen to. Could you really imagine in your mind listening to Kerry or Clinton II giving speeches for four years? It's like poor Martin O'Malley - I tried my fucking best to try to listen to the things he said. They just would not enter my brain. The words kept sliding right the fuck off. A walking white noise machine.

Polls say T-dawg and C-bigg are tied in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. These will only continue to tilt in Trump's favor as the year goes on.

Once again, since Bernie Sanders is where the "center" of the country is located, Clinton will lose support as she becomes more of a bloodthirsty right extremist, and Trump will pick up support as he magically becomes a reasonable centrist.

Not rocket science people. Clinton's numbers have always been an ethereal illusion - they've never gone up during an election season. It's all name recognition and the imaginary person they think she is in their heads. Then the campaign starts, the lazy bastards finally start paying attention, and they recoil in horror.

I think she'd be lucky to carry the same states Kerry did.

[trap15]

Some rumors that she had her FBI interview yesterday.

I'd be so happy if she goes to prison. You don't even know.

[EmperorIng]

A man can dream, but Loretta Lynch and the rest of the DOJ cowards could not be farther from concepts such as "legality" and "justice."

Also: it's hard to listen to John Kerry now, especially as he is an all-around loser of a politician. Not only do I now feel bad that I actually used to "support" him in my anti-Bush youth, but also feel bad for everyone who supported him in earnest.

It was also hard to listen to Martin O'Malley, but that's because I couldn't make out what he said over the din of a burning Baltimore.

[BulletMagnet]

It sure as hell worked for Obama.

Whatever Obama's shortcomings, now or then, he was and is vastly more qualified than a cavernous, echo-filled empty shell like Trump will ever be. And sorry, but for all the hype he got at times, his crowd was never half as eager to ignore a daily-growing laundry list of glaring, horrendous shortcomings as the true believers of Trump Nation.

Could you really imagine in your mind listening to Kerry or Clinton II giving speeches for four years?

If they got their facts straight and actually utilized them to, y'know, attempt that whole "more perfect union" thing instead of just shooting off more fireworks and cranking up the brass band to distract from the mess? Damn skippy I would - hell, someone out here might even learn something about the way the country actually functions.

The "charisma" thing is the same nose-in-the-air plutocratic trash that made 2000 close enough for Gore to lose to a sick joke like W., and the sooner it and its adherents make their long-overdue trip to the trash bin of history, the better.

[antron]

Sam Wang at Princeton later added this to his prediction:

Note: I have found a problem with this calculation. The national-poll-based Clinton win probability is closer to 70%. I will have an update and explanation soon.

Fuuuuuuck

[quash]

Whatever Obama's shortcomings, now or then, he was and is vastly more qualified than a cavernous, echo-filled empty shell like Trump will ever be. And sorry, but for all the hype he got at times, his crowd was never half as eager to ignore a daily-growing laundry list of glaring, horrendous shortcomings as the true believers of Trump Nation.

Obama was, to put it lightly, as minimally qualified as a career politician could be. He was a junior senator in way over his head, not fully realizing just how much he was being taken advantage of at the time.

Trump isn't a career politician, but this in and of itself isn't necessarily an issue. Furthermore, he has proven that he is beyond a shadow of a doubt the greatest political strategist in the history of democracy. He has defied every expectation and come out ahead of everyone.

If they got their facts straight and actually utilized them to, y'know, attempt that whole "more perfect union" thing instead of just shooting off more fireworks and cranking up the brass band to distract from the mess? Damn skippy I would - hell, someone out here might even learn something about the way the country actually functions.

Again with this romanticizing of so-called "reason". Tell me again why you don't want SkyNet ruling the world? SkyNet would only operate in the best interests of itself, much like any politician does, but at least you wouldn't have to deal with pesky things like personal presentation and public speaking.

The "charisma" thing is the same nose-in-the-air plutocratic trash that made 2000 close enough for Gore to lose to a sick joke like W., and the sooner it and its adherents make their long-overdue trip to the trash bin of history, the better.

Charisma is a critical element of politics, dude, and it's been around much longer than your narrow window of history is suggesting. Teddy Roosevelt would be considered a shitlord by today's standards, and the world was completely unaware of FDR's paralysis for years. You can't tell me that appearance doesn't or shouldn't matter in politics, when all the history in the world suggests otherwise.

[quash]

Considering that, just in the past two or three weeks, the Supah Dupah Librul New York Times had a cover article in its Sunday Magazine about how much of a hawk Hillary is

Great, we need more honest coverage like that. That still doesn't change the media's overall left-leaning bias in any way, shape or form, for the record. People are still far more concerned about free college and legalizing weed than they are about the real possibility that Hillary is going to catalyze a large scale conflict in the Middle East.

(by way of contrast, how many in Trump's crowd know how massive a tax cut he wants to give to the rich, and how much it'll explode the national debt?)

He's said in numerous interviews that he wants the upper class to pay more, albeit in different ways than they currently do (lower corporate taxes to help accommodate for higher minimum wage, but increased income tax for individuals, among other proposals).

He knows that it's going to be negotiated and that it's going to be different from what he has put out. Basically, we can't actually speculate on this yet because it may end up being turned into something else entirely or simply shot down as is.

are unaware of the general nature of Clinton's foreign policy positions; if nothing else she's bothered to formalize and lay them out in the open, at least beyond general assertions of "we're gonna kick everyone's ass, it's gonna be great, yeeeaahhh".

"We came, we saw, he died" is so much better.

Speaking of which, if by "return sovereignty to" you and Trump mean "support Assad", I'm not sure there's a particularly good option to be had in Syria...heaven knows that military intervention has come back to bite us in the backside more than once in recent years, but so has the "just ignore the brutal dictator as long as he's not bombing us at the moment" approach.

Hillary literally wants to stage a full invasion of Syria to instate a puppet government that would act solely in the interests of the US so as to antagonize Russia and prepare for a war in Iran.

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/hil ... yria-15339

[BryanM]

That still doesn't change the media's overall left-leaning bias in any way, shape or form

It's a corporate bias, not "left". Inclusionary identity politics is preferred because for christ's sake they're trying to make a buck here. Why would you want to scare the Mexicans away by telling them they suck when you're trying to sell them some goddamn Cheetos?

Similarly goes the long term capitalist interest - they want their handouts to be invisible as opposed to blatant huge tax cuts that explode the national debt. They don't want the rabble to get upset, or, god forbid, they might elect FDR again. We created term limits and did some other stuff to make sure that would never ever happen again.

Short term capitalists tend to be limited to the carbon fuel industry, which has been aware for quite some time that they need to go out of business if the human species is going to last more than a couple more centuries.

Identity fucking politics man.

It's enough to push an entire population into voting in the best interests of The Trump Organization, over the financial or fuel industry. Crazy times we live in.

[BryanM]

A great article on my favorite pundits this season. Very Tobias Funke. Cutting edge observations like:

This state is practically built on the idea of filming police officers and pestering them about maritime law, so they see the harassment Sanders’ campaign is built on as inherently patriotic.

I really cannot understate my dislike for Nate Silver. His only claim to fame is that he was allowed on TV to say "ya know, polling is one of the only objective ways to guess how an election will turn out!" as though this were some kinda revelation. And then he performed roughly identically to the average of polls over at Real Clear Politics. So he's just Some Guy who got to go on TV and be smug for us.

Then this year... jesus christ, this year. In mid 2015, Bernie was on a trajectory similar to how Obama was, the only question was what was his ceiling. Trump remained in the lead month after month, making it more and more likely every week that he was this year's Mitt Romney. That was what the objective data said. Silver dismissed them both in his soothsayer analysis. And of course, the polls showing Hillary melting before a unified GOP and Bernie beating them, he dismisses those too, in huge disingenuous twitter rants.



This kind of intellectual dishonesty is what we in the scientific community refer to as "phaggotry".

So any burns of the man, I find quite delightful. And there are tons from these fellers to be had:

This weasel-like equivocation is nothing new from Nate Silver. When judging his prediction record, Nate begs that people look at two of his models and pick whichever one was correct (!):

@virgiltexas Essentially, yes. He gets two shots and we STILL beat him.

— Benchmark Politics (@benchmarkpol) May 4, 2016

538's "Polls-only" model is up to 52/57 (91%) correct "calls" this year, and "polls-plus" up to 51/57 (89%), after Sanders's win in WV.

LOL, what about all the races you declined to call? It's like omitting 30 questions on a test & saying "I got a 91!"

[EmperorIng]

Likening Donald Trump to Nickelback is absolutely offensive to Trump. Highly unwarranted. Uncalled for, even.

[quash]

Forgot to throw in a "Sad!" at the end, there.

I hope the remaining Bernouts think long and hard about whether they're going to vote for the biggest neocon in this race or the guy who wants to fix many of the same issues their candidate did.

[Mischief Maker]

Forgot to throw in a "Sad!" at the end, there.

I hope the remaining Bernouts think long and hard about whether they're going to vote for the biggest neocon in this race or the guy who wants to fix many of the same issues their candidate did.

You mean by defaulting on the dollar?

Unlike Trump, when Bernie talks about "fixing" America he doesn't mean it in the veterinary sense of the term.