JackRiddler
JackRiddler's JournalYou call it ridiculous and then admit it!
You: "Primary polling is unreliable and people can and do change their minds."
Therefore anyone selling primary polling as "science," setting odds as if they're running a betting parlor, or making claims like "99% chance of Clinton winning Michigan!," is concealing the unreliability and selling themselves. This is a for-profit industry. Really it's not unlike the financial ratings agencies. All kinds of predictions can turn out reliable in normal times, and then it gets useless in extraordinary times but continues to pretend it has acquired a legitimate expertise to speak down to everyone else.*
There is no incentive for Nate Silver or any of the rest of these outfits to say: "Don't pay attention to me, because I don't really know for sure." Or: "Screw what the odds are, pay attention to the issues and vote for what you think is right."
* (All these would-be Snopes-style fact-checkers are another one. There's no reason why the outfit should have more authority than the argument, but people cite them as though they do.)
Yes, Clinton very likely blames POCs in these speeches. (What I was about to say!)
This is VERY likely. Not POC as such but she surely adopted the line of the top banksters (which they disseminated through the media and the right wing, but did not believe themselves). The crisis was the fault of irresponsible borrowing by poor people.
The complete reverse of the truth:
In 2001, it was impossible for the same poor people to borrow. After 2002, the banks and their mortgage selling entities aggressively marketed exactly this form of irresponsible borrowing to precisely these same poor people. By 2004 they were selling mortgages openly on the basis that since the market would go up by 20% a year every year, you need never fear default since you could always sell at a profit. A perpetual money machine! In late 2006 the top banksters the game was up soon and turned incredibly criminal. They pushed hard on the marketing and conspired with the ratings agencies to suppress the crash until they had unloaded as much of their own toxic MBS as they could. They set up funds to short their own instruments, even going so far as to set up instruments (e.g. for Paulsen and Magnetar) that could be sold to suckers on the one side and shorted on the other. The crash started in August 2007 and they continued to pursue a denial strategy well into 2008. Virtually within a minute of the bailout the media and right wing kicked in with "Fannie and Freddie and irresponsible borrowers!" And this is very likely the kind of shit Clinton was talking. The kind of shit that at least some people within these banks will happily leak after she gets the nomination.
Do you support the 55-year U.S. attack on Cuba?
We are presumably U.S. citizens, U.S. voters, U.S. taxpayers. We are responsible for U.S. policy, not Cuban policy. Our government launched a failed invasion of Cuba and maintained a 55-year blockade, causing great suffering for the people of the island. Besides being wrong, this obviously failed. Meanwhile, our government organized and backed regimes throughout Mesoamerica that were and are in every way far worse than Cuba. Hundreds of thousands dead in El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Nicaragua (due to Somoza and then the CIA-Contras), and now Mexico. Given that horrific record, which makes Castro look quite humane by comparison, what is the U.S. government standing for harrassing Cuba? It should also be said that we live in today, not yesterday. Obama has finally changed the policy toward Cuba. Do you support the opening to Cuba, or would you prefer to go back to the Cold War atrocities?
They're doing worse than that...
They're going back to the eighties to resurrect Reagan death-squad politics.
Clinton's insane description of Castro described nothing about Cuba, and everything about 1980s El Salvador, the Contras... all the way down to her husband's Plan Colombia... and the Bush Mexico plan that she continued as secretary... and the Honduras coup, where the death squads are back and killing environmental activists.
Miami Debate Reveals Last Stand of McCarthyite Red-Baiting
As far as the hard right wing is concerned, a foreign socialist has already run the country for eight years. They have already been mobilized for a long time, and are well past their peak.
But the same goes for the Cold War anti-communist liberal-to-conservative consensus.
IMPORTANT: When I say "anti-communist" I do not mean opposition to the actual states of the former Communist bloc. Anti-communism is a specific ideology of denunciation that since Truman (actually Wilson!) has been used to discipline the left in the West.
In the U.S., this ideology is now in radical decline. It has not reproduced itself. It is the brainwashing of the old, and they have more pressing problems. The young don't care about it. The hardcore warmongers realized this and switched to "terrorism" nearly 20 years ago.
So last night in Miami, especially if there is a Sanders-Trump general election, will represent the beginning of the end for anti-communist true belief as a force in American politics. If you think this way, then you have already been mobilized for decades.
Some of you think Castro is the devil for having withstood a 55-year U.S. attack on Cuba. But you have nothing or little to say about the U.S.-backed death squads who terrorized and who in many cases continue to terrorize the entire region, from Mexico through Central America to Colombia. Those are American tax dollars at work, from before Reagan all the way to Secretary Clinton's backing of the Honduras coup. We don't vote on the government in Cuba, we vote on how U.S. tax dollars are spent.
The young are not motivated by this crap, they don't remember this crap. It has zero salience for most of them. Insofar as a substantial minority of the young are informed and motivated, they look forward to peace and dealing with the issues that actually matter to their lives and to the future of humanity.
In the future Miami will not be threatened by communist hordes. It will almost certainly sink under the ocean, however. That is an issue to address!
What does "exit polling" mean in this case?
The only people exiting were the ones in the hall, and I guess they were for Bernie as the standing ovation and chants at the end showed. But these are not polls of that small group but Internet polls - which I also believe have something to indicate, "scientific" or not. (I put that in quotes since the usual "scientific" polling as we have seen applies systematic methods but doesn't necessarily get accurate results.) Nevertheless, the headline is misleading, or breathlessly wrong.
Why do they blame Nader for a coup d'etat by the Supreme Court...
and the election fraud in Florida under Jeb Bush?
It's epic avoidance. It must be so comforting to have a small scapegoat instead of to acknowledge a vast crime against democracy, the country and the world. Sad. Nader had nothing to do with the outcome, any more than did all the Democrats who voted for Bush.
Gore won the election and the popular vote in Florida. Florida was stolen by election fraud. The SC backed Scalia's opinion that stopped the count which would have given the state and the presidency to Gore.
Odds are right-wing Latino voters in Florida...
are not registered as Democrats. Not yet, anyway.
Reports have been that Latinos in Florida, especially Cubans, are shifting away from their traditional allegiance to the Republicans, given generational change, the opening in Cuba policy, and the Republican demonization of Latinos generally.
I hope Clinton tries the line about South American socialists in tonight's Univision debate.
What could possibly go wrong for her?
Although I also hope Sanders will be better prepared than he was for the Big Lie about the auto bailout.
That was a stunner and an outrage, of course, and it backfired totally on Clinton since Michigan workers actually knew the details. But Sanders needed to make it much more clear that she had completely made that shit up (which she used as a counterweight to talk about her Wall Street connections).
The Wall Street bailout money that Sanders voted against was never intended for the auto industry - it was an executive shift by Obama that allowed some of it to be used to bail out GM.
(This was also a joke - the government owned GM for a while and could have converted it and its suppliers into domestic fully unionized producers of electric cars, trains, wind turbines, solar panels, etc. Instead they re-floated the beast that makes the SUVs. Hoo-rah. But anyway, in TV debates it has to be one point at a time.)
Basic problem: primary polling doesn't work very well.
Turnouts are small compared to generals. Local factors and voter motivation on the day of the vote is everything. Winds change quickly. It's just one state at a time and highly specialized demographics can swing results.
It seems Nate Silver's too far up the bunghole of his own successes to admit these obvious realities even to himself. Cleverly weighted averages of a bunch of junk are still junk.
When the data-driven people have everyone wired via brain chip - I'm sure some of them are looking forward to that - they might manage the feat of making primary polls as reliable as they are for general elections.
Meanwhile every other post on this site is like, "oooooh, 98 point lead for Hillary in State X! Stop the fight!"
We see what the effects of this voter suppression strategy have been: higher turnouts for the Republicans, who are eating up all the coverage with their shitshow. (It probably won't work out for them in the end, for obvious reasons, dick size, etc. We will learn if there is a bottom to underestimating the intelligence of the American public...)
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