Election 2016
gregladen | October 16, 2016There are some interesting, and in some cases, potentially disturbing, things going on with the state by state numbers in the current election. Most of this has to do with third party candidates, and most of it with Gary Johnson.
First, I'll note, that despite fears among liberals and progressives that a lot of Bernie Bots would flock to third party candidates and eschew Clinton, there is no strong evidence that Clinton is losing much to any third party candidates. However, in some states, especially those with libertarian tendencies, Gary Johnson is doing fairly well. And, this had been…
gregladen | October 14, 2016... until you have cleaned house and stopped embarrassing yourselves. And by clean house, I mean, take are of this deeply offensive bullshit your people are now spewing out.
You have turned a very bad situation into something ten times worse.
As background, this comes from a meeting of national level evangelical leaders who got together to decide what to do about Donald Trump. They decided to fully support Trump, and the woman in the video shown here is giving their arguments. I am not making this up.
See also:
Two Women Say Donald Trump Touched Them Inappropriately
Palm Beach Post…
gregladen | October 13, 2016First, Michele Obama's full speech earlier today:
You know two news outlets have produced confirming evidence of actual sexual assault by Donald Trump. So, naturally, Trump intends to sue.
But, this from Media Matters:
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s threats to The New York Times for reporting allegations that he committed sexual assault are legally far-fetched and provide a troubling portrait of how a Trump administration would handle the press, according to experts interviewed by Media Matters.
...
Several experts tell Media Matters his latest threats of legal action…
gregladen | October 13, 2016Or so it is alleged. Rather credibly.
Trump talked about sexual assault in 2005, that was recorded on tape, those tapes released Friday. Trump denied that he actually ever sexually assaulted/groped anyone during the Sunday debate, just a couple of days later.
Meanwhile many Republicans running for Congress distanced themselves from Trump and condemned him.
Then, the rabid right wing Teabagging Republican Trump supporters warned those Republicans that they had to get in line and support Trump or else. So, of course, lacking courage of conviction or ethics or morals or, really, brains, those…
gregladen | October 11, 2016Above is my latest electoral college projection.
This uses the technique previously described. However, instead of using RCP averages for all polled states and then using extreme (non-tossup) states to develop the regression model, this method uses only polling from states with one or more recent poll, and only with good polls. these poll numbers are then "predicted" by black/hispanic/white/Voted_Romney numbers, and that generates a model, based on just over 20 states, designed to predict all the states.
As expected, the r-squared value is much lower using this method, but this method does…
gregladen | October 11, 2016There has been a lot of talk about Trump and Russia and Putin. I think most people watching this see some sort of connections. Some go so far as to say that Trump is literally a Russian agent. Here is an interesting perspective from intelligence expert Malcolm Nance, author of The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election ...
About Nance's book:
In April 2016, computer technicians at the Democratic National Committee discovered that someone had accessed the organization’s computer servers and conducted a theft that is best described as…
gregladen | October 10, 2016I've made my first stab at a prediction for the electoral college outcome for the US Presidential race, 2016. I use a roughly similar methodology as I did to accurately predict most of the Democratic primaries. However, since primaries are different from a general, the methodology had to be adapted.
For the primaries, I eventually used this methodology. I used results form prior primaries to predict voter behavior by ethnicity, in order to predict final behavior. That worked because primaries are done a few states at a time, and because all the people being modeled were Democrats.
It turns…
gregladen | October 10, 2016You can't say who really won the debate, because on Friday, news broke, confirming other news from the prior Monday (and general suspicians) indicating that Donald Trump is not fit to be President in Yet Another Way, and his campaign essentially imploded. So, instead, we'll ask, "who won the weekend?"
As you know, I'm the last person to write off Donald Trump. From the very beginning, without fail, I've been warning you that he'll do well, that he'll win the GOP debates, that he'll win various primaries, that he'll win the nomination, etc. All of it. I have never once been wrong about this…
gregladen | October 9, 2016I have no idea why so many smart people are saying that anything that happened over the last few days changes this election, or destroys the Republican Party. Pay attention, people. that is not what is happening.
The Republican Party has become the party that harbors racism, sexism, misogyny, xenophobia, hate, politically expedient willful ignorance about all things science, classism, anything anti-PC, and dedicated service to the demands of the wealthiest Americans.
Most of that comes from the Tea Party the rest comes from the elite in the party. In this way, the Republican Party…
gregladen | October 8, 2016You know the problem. Not just the release of the "I'd grab her ..." tape, but starting before that. Here, watch:
A roughly written Facebook comment by me, reacting to much of the reaction I'm seeing:
To everyone who is saying that Trump is out of the race because of his admitted preference for sexual assault as a way of getting women to like him: Sorry, you are wrong, and you may be living in a bubble.
Do a transect across humanity, in the US. You will find that a double digit percentage of both women and men (though I'll allow you the possibly true but possibly not true idea that more men…
gregladen | September 27, 2016The US is already behind in its agreed to commitment to clean power
A study just out in Nature climate Change suggests that the US is already behind in its commitments to reduce the use of fossil fuel as an energy source, and the concomitant release of climate-warming greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
The paper, by Jeffery Greenblatt and Max Wei, says:
Current intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs)are insufficient to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting temperature change to between 1.5 and 2.0◦C above pre-industrial levels, so the effectiveness of existing INDCs will…
gregladen | September 27, 2016It was a tossup, but in a rather complicated way.
Even the regular commenters with major network news, and PBS, clearly indicated that Hillary Clinton won this debate. And she did. She not only had better answers, but actual answers. Trump acted very poorly and Clinton acted presidential. Trump got caught in several lies, and made several more lies that were to be caught later. He made a fool of himself and Clinton did very well.
Therefore, it was a tossup. It was a tossup because a couple percent of the populous are former Bernie Sanders supporters with so much butt hurt that they will not…
gregladen | September 22, 2016This is it. Don't mess this up.
It isn't that common that a single event can have a cascading effect on so many things. And if it does, such an event would not be that likely to have an entirely negative effect on all it touches. But, the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States would be such an event.
Therefore, in turn and in opposition, your vote this November 8th matters as much as his presidency would matter. So, you must vote. (And please remember to NOT VOTE FOR TRUMP. That's the point. Do not vote for Trump.)
Also please, make sure that if you intend to vote for a…
gregladen | September 21, 2016Sciencedebate.org has managed a seemingly impossible task. They developed 20 distinct (but often interrelated) questions about science policy, based on vast amounts of public input, and then got all four presidential candidates to address them. Congratulations to Sciencedebate.org. This is important, and I know that was not easy to do. The questions, and answers, are here.
Here are my reactions to the candidates responses for some of the questions.
1. Innovation. Science and engineering have been responsible for over half of the growth of the U.S. economy since WWII. But some reports…
gregladen | September 16, 2016"After years of peddling a false conspiracy theory that President Obama wasn't born in the United States, Donald Trump — just 53 days before Election Day — now says he believes the president was born in the U.S.
"President Obama was born in the United States. Period," Trump said at a campaign event in a ballroom in his new hotel in Washington. "Now, we want to get back to ... (bla bla bla)."
That's from NPR.
This is clearly going to hurt Donald Trump with his base. The accusation to begin with wad deplorable, after all.
That was today, a few minutes ago.
But yesterday ...
Start about…
gregladen | September 14, 2016Ignorant hateful white men who worship a rising fascist dictator look like this.
gregladen | September 14, 2016Following up on one of the issues addressed in "How The Press Created FrankenTrump and Ruined Civilization", we have this:
gregladen | September 13, 2016ScienceDebate.org is an organization that, for years now, has been pushing to get the candidates running for President of the United States to engage in a debate over science policy, just as they debate foreign policy, or economic policy, etc.
And, ScienceDebate.org has had some success. Some of the candidates, at the primary level, have engaged in such a debate, and at the national level, some of the candidates have contributed written answers to citizen-generated questions about science policy.
And now, they've done it again.
The four main candidates (two actual main candidates and two…
gregladen | September 12, 2016I have to say, first, that when I hear the term "Basket of Deplorables" I think right away of Edward Gorey, for some reason. Do you?
Anyway, I've seen and hear a lot of whining and bellyaching about this term, and Secretary Clinton's statement.
But most people have only heard the statement, and not the discussion that led up to it. That, folks, is the real story. So spend two minutes and edumicate yourself:
Personally, I can't see how one would support Trump unless one was fully deplorable, or a basket case, or both. Secretary Clinton underestimated with that 50% thumbsuck guess.