Can't speak for the US, but the UK is getting seriously worrying.
When I checked yesterday it looked like surprisingly, the odds that Trump loses the popular vote, _given that_ he wins, are about 1 in 3. (White male support helps you in the EC!) That would be about the worst result possible short of violence/crisis, since Democrats would roll over.
I'm not clear on what pro-civil war people are hoping to accomplish. Like, if you think the government is oppressive now, how exactly is a prolonged episode of people shooting other people going to improve that situation?
Not that I have a better idea in that scenario, obviously.
I think most likely there are very sporadic attempts at intimidation, maybe violence but less, and when Clinton wins there's no crisis. But enough to make it more likely we get worse at some point in the future.
As long as they're oppressed less than black people are oppressed, it's good.
a prolonged episode of people shooting other people
I'm sure there's a not-insignificant number of Trump supporters who see that as a feature rather than a bug.
1: Your constitution is just hundreds of years of people making it up as they went along. Calvinball is resilient to attacks on the system, especially with having a real high court now. I think you guys will be okay, no matter how much The Sun tries to stir up your fascists.
2: Well...in that situation the right thing to do is to let him win. He won. Them's the breaks. But then to be recalcitrant as fuck, make his job impossible, preserve the filibuster, try their hardest possible to prevent filling the 9th SC seat, and make a serious push to abolish the EC (which might actually get traction this time). Do all the scorched earth stuff the Republicans have done and said they will continue to do. They'd have earned it. However, I don't think that future is ver likely.
the odds that Trump loses the popular vote, _given that_ he wins, are about 1 in 3.
This is not at all concerning. I mean, if my aunt had wheels, she'd be a wagon.
Well...in that situation the right thing to do is to let him win. He won.
If he wins fairly, then yes. But where it all breaks down is if he wins because of something like voter disenfranchisement in North Carolina.
8: And about 1 in 10 overall, if you believe Nate Silver. But it was more interesting than concerning - that if we had national popular vote, he would be much worse off.
9 - she'd be a pretty crappy wagon.
And about 1 in 10 overall, if you believe Nate Silver.
I don't!
She'd be a cart. Or a chariot, or a limber, I suppose.
11, 14 - you should obviously choose the median poll-aggregator as your baseline. Has anyone created an aggregator of aggregators yet?
If my aunt had one wheel, would she be a unicycle or a wheelbarrow? Just like this election.
Answering my own question: http://pollyvote.com/en/
I like my aunts like I like my bicycles.
21: Cool, their map is exactly in alignment with my expectations, to the state.
As plot elements in Wodehouse novels?
25: Did they weight all three of Silver's identical predictions equally???
26: Yes! Now obviously, there are some issues with this. So the right thing to do is to also take the geometric mean of this six values, and then take the arithmetic mean of those two means, to get a poll aggregator aggregator aggregator. Surely that will be more correct.
As long as we're measuring the length of the emperor's nose, anybody else got any numbers they'd like to throw in?
(I'm pretty sure Slate is joking. Pretty sure.)
Like, if you think the government is oppressive now, how exactly is a prolonged episode of people shooting other people going to improve that situation?
They get to shoot black people, Hispanics and liberals.
Revolutions rarely improve things in the short run, but sometimes you just have to take a stand for your principles.
Bridgegate: Both defendants found guilty on all counts.
Hooray. Does that mean Christie will be in the dock next?
Because I think spending time in prison would really help him appreciate "Nebraska" on a deeper level and I know I would really enjoy the fact that the guy who went around saying "Lock her up" was in prison while the woman he wanted to lock up was in the White House.
Win/win, really.
It's a little amusing now on Twitter. British journalists are just unbelievably depressed. The only things they ever post about the US election is the one poll in 10 that shows Hillary tied or losing in a swing state, and the daily article from somebody saying "Remember... we thought Brexit and Cameron would lose. Democratic complacency will be their death knell next week. All the horrors of 2016 will inevitably culminate in the death of Western civilization." Meanwhile from people in the US itself, this is what you see.
I stopped with twitter. I figure if something important comes across on it, somebody will mention it here.
Gin and Tacos: "Pardon me for having a hard time believing that the people who hate walking to the point that they wait several minutes to park their Suburban in a spot 15 feet closer to the door of Golden Corral are going to revolt."
I'm having a harder time than I expected finding the average age of a Trump supporter.
I am worried about the Supreme Court issue. Nobody cares if the Republicans in Congress block 99% of Obama's appointees and leave thousands of federal jobs empty for years. That has been made clear. Nobody ever hears about those people in the press or knows what those jobs entail, and the Republicans benefit from it because they benefit from making the government fail to function. But the Supreme Court is different. Everyone knows how the Supreme Court works. It has nine justices on it. If it has eight justices, it can't function. If the Republicans refuse to appoint anybody after the election, people will notice. But will people noticing have any effect? If they get away with THAT, I don't know what happens.
Post-election violence isn't what I'm worried about, rather it's Trump losing by a respectable margin - which now seems like the most likely outcome. It will then be known you can run a campaign based on open white supremacy and ressentiment, and still get well within striking distance of the White House. All you need to get you the rest of the way there is to try again with a disciplined, competent candidate. Trump himself may go away, or get pushed away, but there's no unringing the bell he rang.
Meanwhile for the next four years, it will be total obstruction: no SC seats or anything else filled, bullshit congressional investigations, etc. Washington will be a shit-show, and persuadable voters will blame Clinton for all of it. She'll lose in 2020, either to a Democratic primary challenger running on a transformational agenda, or to the GOP challenger running on a transformational agenda. The one big thing that happened in the rich, western countries in 2016 is that the establishment has been exposed as exhausted and hollow. They'll limp through this cycle, maybe, but it seems unlikely they'll survive another.
I mean, I can compute it myself using the breakdown by age range, but come on.
40: Find a bunch of partially informed speculation about it and then average those estimates.
It will then be known you can run a campaign based on open white supremacy and ressentiment
This has been known since Nixon.
38. Not revolution, but much more frequent acts of minor political violence. Not all of them are lazy, and the lazy ones are giving their kids pretty clear instructions.
The guy in Iowa who just shot two policemen after being told to stop waving a confederate flag at black high school kids. The crackers in Kansas planning to bomb a Somali mosque-- more than talk, they tried to buy guns from an FBI agent.
More of this, I am afraid.
Post-election violence isn't what I'm worried about, rather it's Trump losing by a respectable margin - which now seems like the most likely outcome. It will then be known you can run a campaign based on open white supremacy and ressentiment, and still get well within striking distance of the White House. All you need to get you the rest of the way there is to try again with a disciplined, competent candidate. Trump himself may go away, or get pushed away, but there's no unringing the bell he rang.
So what you're worried about has already happened?
...they tried to buy guns from an FBI agent.
Luckily, not one of the agents that's leaking for Trump.
49: Well, no. None of these things have in fact happened yet.
The transition from dog whistles to audible whistles is not a meaningless one, though!
"The return from dog whistles to audible whistles" seems more accurate.
But with that said the key difference is that the silent majority is now a (large, but still) minority. So you can expect lots more lashing out and crazitude and maybe some violence, but less power.
My prediction is that in 2020 the Republicans will run a sane but "conservative" candidate, who will lose by a small margin, unless the country is in serious recession/depression, in which case the R candidate will win by a fairly small margin. There will absolutely not be some contest of putatively "transformational"/non-establishment candidates on both sides. Willing to take bets on this.
The problem is that even with "less power," they still probably have enough to block almost anything from getting done.
Good lord, yes, ok, we're all clever folks here who know all about the southern strategy, but there's a huge difference between the innuendo we grew up hearing from Republicans and the naked hostility against minorities we've seen from Trump and other Republicans in this election cycle. This is the sort of stuff that filters all the way down to school children, and can lead to serious social unrest.
54: They'll be a large minority - with maximal ability to vote, whereas the reverse is true for most of their electoral opponents.
Only ~1/2 of Americans eligible to vote actually do so. There's plenty of room there for determined minorities either to win elections, or make governing impossible for those that do.
This is the sort of stuff that filters all the way down to school children
Oh boy is it ever! It's been bad.
We'll for sure see a resurgence of the militia movement in some form or another. Probably some acts of terrorism from them as well.
Also, when they commit their acts of terrorism, they will be acquitted.
Don't really disagree with either 56 or 57, but it's more a story of continuity than anything else. The real story of 2016 ISTM is that the country is so polarized on partisan lines that the Republicans can pull in most of their voters and politicians running Donald Trump. No reason not to expect that dynamic to continue, and they won't run Trump next time.
Jamelle Bouie: "The American teleology of ceaseless progress is complicated by Redemption, a period where the enemies of democracy won."
I think 61 is right. I'm not really surprised to learn that something close to half of Republican primary voters are at least willing to tolerate blatant racism and sexism. It's a bit higher than I would have hoped prior to 2015, but you knew it was there. I'm surprised that they were able to get nearly the whole rest of the party to stick with them when they did it. That changes the game because nobody is going to worry that they have to be civil enough that Mitt Romney is willing to stand next to them in order to keep the votes of all Republicans.
Having politics polarized on ethnic lines is bad, but all over Europe it is worse than it is here, because the native Europeans are the dominant majority and because they are afraid of immigrants and Muslims, so they will be voting in the conservative parties everywhere in Europe for the foreseeable future.
We both have less hatred of immigrants here than any European country, and have less of an objective immigrant crisis than all the places that are easy for terrifying Muslim refugees to get to.
63,61: What's new this cycle is the vile racial and sexual politics were put in such stark terms that there's no shred of plausible deniability to hide behind. At the same time, all the free market, supply-side stuff essentially got dumped. All this, and only a handful of GOP voters walked in protest. I'd prefer to be wrong here, but I don't see how business as usual is possible after that.
I'm not arguing business as usual is possible. My best guess is a slow motion collapse of the Republican Party that fucks up politics for at least a decade before something approaching normal governance is possible.
Also, starkly undeniable racism and sexism aren't "new". It's just new since 1968 or there about.
At the same time, all the free market, supply-side stuff essentially got dumped. All this, and only a handful of GOP voters walked in protest. I'd prefer to be wrong here, but I don't see how business as usual is possible after that.
This is the big change. We don't notice it because the Republicans have been the racist and sexist party forever, but all the people who vote Republican and consider themselves intellectuals are very depressed about finding out that maybe 5% of people care even a little about "conservative" economic policy.
In defense of the people who are Republicans because of the racism, "conservative" economic policy is really stupid.
Well, right. Those guys may be terrible people, but they're the only ones who are getting what they came for out of the Republican party.
Right. There is no groundswell from the average Joe telling you to get rid of Social Security and create a flat tax and get rid of the minimum wage. Nobody believes it will make their lives better because it won't. You have been doing all that stuff just for your own benefit, guys.
This might be one of those cases where consequentalist and deontological ethics point in different directions.
Also, starkly undeniable racism and sexism aren't "new". It's just new since 1968 or there about.
This highlights how we're getting this all wrong. Stark undeniable sexism and racism were the law of the land until just a little before 1968 (and after too, but not wanting to get lost in details).
Here's some charming news from a philosophy grad student!
Teaching Ethics in the age of Trump: discussion of Bernard Williams's "Critique of Utilitarianism" went off on a tangent during class today, because one out of every six students in the room was unwilling to endorse, as a general principle, "Shooting protesters is bad". (I had them put their heads down and took a show of hands.)
Also a disturbing number of people who believed that research into chemical and biological weapons was a positive good, but I didn't take a count of them.
Zero people thought there was anything wrong with George taking the job or Jim shooting a captive. I tried to motivate these views and was met with blank stares.
Yay! Children are our future!
JMM's current map, if you give ties (FL, NC, NH) to Trump, is 269-269. Undoubtedly in that situation Hillary wins the popular vote, probably by 2-3 million. But the structure of the House (1 vote per state delegation) is such that Trump wins.
Zero people thought there was anything wrong with George taking the job
I'm telling you, the man in the yellow hat needs to learn how to deal with an ADD monkey, instead they just keep giving him more chances to fuck up, mess up paper delivery routes, destroy bikes, ruin the circus.
one out of every six students in the room was unwilling to endorse, as a general principle, "Shooting protesters is bad".
Did he get a count on how many of them were willing to endorse, as a general principle, "Trolling is good"? Because man, if there is ANYTHING Trump has normalized on a vast scale...
74: Am I a monster if I think there are reasonably likely situations where further nuclear weapons research is a good thing?
Fun "vote!" music video featuring Rachel Bloom, Moby, self-referentiality, and a bunch of people whose faces I should probably recognize.
But the Supreme Court is different. Everyone knows how the Supreme Court works. It has nine justices on it. If it has eight justices, it can't function. If the Republicans refuse to appoint anybody after the election, people will notice. But will people noticing have any effect? If they get away with THAT, I don't know what happens.
Just so we're clear, they've already done this. It's been a total non-issue in the election. Why would anything be different after the election?
(Sure, they initially *said* they were just waiting for the election, so that The American People could weigh in on the choice, but that was transparent bullshit at the time. They were stalling because they don't want to confirm a justice nominated by a democrat. (More pointedly: much of the party base would object to anyone who helped confirm a Justice nominated by a Democrat.) None of that changes after the election.)
All this, and only a handful of GOP voters walked in protest.
And the ladies. Women are leaving in droves, and if they vote for a Democrat once, some will get a taste for it.
Seriously, y'all. You should look forward to your post-Republican future.
1. Demography is on our side and Latinos picked Democrat.
2. Obama has announced that his post-presidency will be about voting and voting rights.
3. Ailes is out at Fox. Of course they'll keep running his playbook, but he was said to be the particular genius who made it work, and that incremental improvement in Fox's message is gone.
4. I am hoping that Clinton wont have any expectation of cooperation and will use all the force she can to advance policy without regard to "norms". Fuck the filibuster.
5. The Trump/conventional Republican split is even deeper now.
I saw a description of populist waves (gay marriage, Occupy, BLM) crashing up on the beach and sliding back, but each one advances good stuff ($15 minimum wage, attention to policing) and the next one reaches higher. Don't know what the next one will be (enviro?), but there's time for another before 2020.
Not only does he play drums, at the height of his techno-fame he released a record playing drums with a punk band called "The Pork Guys".
(Sure, they initially *said* they were just waiting for the election, so that The American People could weigh in on the choice, but that was transparent bullshit at the time. They were stalling because they don't want to confirm a justice nominated by a democrat. (More pointedly: much of the party base would object to anyone who helped confirm a Justice nominated by a Democrat.) None of that changes after the election.)
Everything changes after the election. The timing of the death of Scalia was a total shock. To the average person it makes sense to delay the replacement after the election. To the average person it does not make sense to delay all Supreme Court justices forever.
It's been an issue in Toomey's re-election. It used to be in attack ads on him. Since the televised celebration of groping, I haven't seen it mentioned but that's because they have a better attack.
I considerably enjoyed Moby's "Are you lost in the world like me?" video.
To the average person it makes sense to delay the replacement after the election.
Do you have support for this? Because I doubt it. And it's not what polls showed at the time.
To the average person it does not make sense to delay all Supreme Court justices forever.
The "average person" doesn't matter. How does the average Republican primary voter feel about the issue?
Heebie, I know you have the same recollection I do, about that essay on authoritarian thought, that people leave cults when they perceive that their strongman leader didn't protect them. (Right, that's what they're trading obedience for, and when it isn't delivered, the cult indoctrination crumbles.) I keep seeing Republican women being quoted with some variant of "I can't believe Republican men chose to protect Trump over protecting us."
It is OK, all y'all. You won't miss them.
87.2: I think it's the average swing state voter that matters.
Megan, I always appreciate your moments of forceful optimism, and yet I find them reassuring, and slightly but not completely convincing. What would I say in response.
1) Surprisingly few Republicans are voting for Clinton. If the final totals are 43/47. Mitt Romney got 47.2. Of the 4% who have changed votes maybe half(?) are voting for a 3rd party protest candidate and of the remaining people half(?) will probably not feel any problems going back to a more conventional republican candidate. So maybe 1% fall into the category of "if they vote for a Democrat once, some will get a taste for it. "
2) Republicans are expected to control the house until 2030 (first link in this comment).
3) Democrats are expected to hold 50 Senate seats after this election and to lose seats in 2018.
None of those make me think that the Democrats are in a notably superior position, in any way other than presidential elections. Particularly if you think that this election has elements of a best-case scenario about it.
I do think there's a lot of reason for optimism about both populist movements, but something like this Yglesias article about building the party contains some good, conventional wisdom, and also makes clear that it's a long process to improve the electoral strength of the Democratic party, even given a moderately favorable environment.
I saw a description of populist waves (gay marriage, Occupy, BLM) crashing up on the beach and sliding back, but each one advances good stuff ($15 minimum wage, attention to policing) and the next one reaches higher. Don't know what the next one will be (enviro?), but there's time for another before 2020.
That's a good description and part of me hears an echo of this passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Demography is on our side and Latinos picked Democrat.
And they're turning out in huge numbers, at least for early voting. Note that neither development was at all inevitable.
I need Megan in my life and comment threads.
Demography is on our side and Latinos picked Democrat.
On an optimistic note, so have Asian-Americans.
Vietnamese-Americans, who number nearly 2 million, with especially large concentrations in California and Texas, are part of the larger narrative of Asian-Americans who have switched party affiliations and votes from Republican to Democratic. In 1992, Republicans won among Asian-Americans by a 22-point margin in the presidential election, according to exit polls; in 2012, Asian-Americans voted Democratic by 47 points, which was nearly double the margin in 2008.
My prediction: Trump loses by a margin that would have been definitive in recent past elections. Let's say 342-196 electoral votes, 51-45 percent of the popular vote. He doesn't concede. He calls it fraud, seizes on all the normal irregularities he can find, maybe literally fabricates something. Republicans back him, or at least don't oppose him, because they haven't so far, why start? This state of affairs goes on for weeks. At some point, a lone or small group of wackos with strong ties to the Republicans (either they actually worked or volunteered for the campaign, or their crazy ideology is unusually partisan as wackos go) kill a few innocent people for being government employees. A postal clerk, a police officer on patrol, someone at the DMV, something like that. That is what it takes for the Republicans to disavow Trump. His movement fizzles, Clinton takes office normally, and there's a honeymoon of a month or so. This year the Electoral College meets on Dec. 19; the wacko incident could happen any time before then.
Then in 2020, the Republicans nominate an Arpaio-LaPage ticket and win.
1) Surprisingly few Republicans are voting for Clinton.
The Dems have put up two non-white-male candidates in a row. We lost some percent to racism last time and some percent to sexism this time. And they're STILL winning. Current Republicans can't all make that switch to vote for anyone who doesn't look traditional, but staying home or going third party does erode their vote. As does losing the energy of their local women party officials. For the presidency at least, the Republicans are out for a generation.
You know how we talk about Pres. Obama playing a long game? Man did he smash up his rivals when he teased Trump that night. He couldn't have known, but I also can't see how he could have done any more damage to the Republican party. And look! He's even flushed out the problems at the FBI.
That's some uncut, first-rate optimism you got going there.
On the one hand, the Presidency. On the other hand, there are more elected Republican officials now than ever before.
Oh, and Sec. Clinton won't be slow to staff up, the way Pres. Obama was. So whatever can be done on the administrative side will be up and running faster.
Not here, there aren't elected Republican officials. The ones we do have are making statewide names for themselves as urban planners/clean energy types.
Oh, and Sec. Clinton won't be slow to staff up, the way Pres. Obama was.
That's a good point - the executive-appointments filibuster being gone now.
Saves time for the impeachment proceedings.
To jump on Megan's optimism bandwagon, Sam Wang's estimated probability for the Dems taking the senate has jumped from 61% a few days ago to 77% today.
I'm mostly enjoying that the "party of family values" has had to shut up about that for once.
If the election breaks well Sam Wang should literally decapitate Nate Silver and eat his brains with a fork. Maybe also if the election goes badly. And I kinda like Nate Silver.
The other problem with Republicans waltzing into a 2020 victory is that they still can't find a candidate worth a hill of beans. (AIHSHBMT) Trump didn't wreck the Republicans, Trump waltzed into the existing wreckage. Republican primary voters have not coalesced around anyone for president until forced to by the calendar, since 2004.
Sam Wang's estimated probability for the Dems taking the senate has jumped from 61% a few days ago to 77% today.
oh please oh please.
107: It looks like the number of victims dropped from five to two. I don't know how many you need to qualify.
Anyhow the main thing about national federal politics right now is that they are both highly polarized and highly unstable. So if either party gets into power they have an incentive to absolutely go for broke because they can't cut deals with the other party and they are highly unlikely to stay in power for the long term. If the Republicans got all three branches of government it would absolutely look like North Carolina in the past few years -- a party totally going for max crazy because who knows when they'll be seen again. But the same is true on the Democratic side -- if (somehow) we got both the Presidency and the Senate it is time to go full steam ahead because what else can you do. When both sides to a conflict have a now-or-never mentality things get pretty wild pretty fast.
I don't really think both sides have a now-or-never mentality.
111- I agree. People are always pretending there is more symmetry between the parties than there really is.
That changes the game because nobody is going to worry that they have to be civil enough that Mitt Romney is willing to stand next to them in order to keep the votes of all Republicans.
Republicanism was always based on an implicit deal in which the elites paid homage to the ignorance and bigotry of the base in exchange for votes. Remember that in 2012, Romney asked Trump to stand by him.
But the base ultimately saw through the Establishment con. Trump seized the moment, and here we are.
110-112: Tigre is essentially correct. The Democrats are finally learning from the Republicans, even if the Democrats can never be quite as hardcore.
Hillary isn't going to come into office with any illusions about working with the Republicans. Remember it was she who coined the term "vast rightwing conspiracy." She knows the score, and increasingly, so does the rest of the party.
(And give Bernie some credit here too, for demonstrating that there is a constituency for Democratic intransigence.)
This was very cathartic for me to read (apologies if linked already and/or offensive):
What's become painfully clear this election cycle is that there's a fundamental disconnect between national journalists -- most of them based in New York City or Washington D.C. -- and the white working-class Americans who are Trump's most ardent supporters. But, except for roughly 7,200 articles on the subject, there has been scant effort made by the mainstream media to understand the kind of voters who say Trump speaks for them. So I set out on a road trip to the part of America most coastal elites don't think about, except when they're reading one of the fourteen daily pieces in the mainstream media where a journalist visits a town most coastal elites don't think about.
90.last: which, of course, is an all time great but of writing, in my opinion...
90: All kinds of movements come in this sort of wave, and it's at least conceivable that in the future, we will recognize this as the moment when the Reagan wave of bigotry and proud ignorance crested.
I have been telling people for years that the country and Republican Party had not yet hit bottom, and it's not yet clear that yahooism is a spent force -- there are still powerful structural forces behind The Stupid. But for the first time in a long time, I think there are reasons to believe that the nuts have Gone Too Far.
116: Yeah, gosh. This line particularly stands out for me:
There was no point in fighting--on our side or theirs.
There was such a sense of historical inevitability, even among the bad guys.
116: Thanks.
||
It's an odd time of year / of the campaign season. I just got a robocall with a recording of Barack Obama asking me to vote for the Democratic candidate the Lt Governor of WA (for whom I've already voted).
I was glad to hear it, I really hope he wins, but I wonder how many of these recordings Obama is doing right now.
|>
114: I agree that there's an incentive to be intransigent, but that's not the same as "now or never." The Republicans are facing a now or never situation. All the trends are running against them. The Democrats have an incentive to be patient, to build a durable majority, even in a situation where mutual agreement isn't possible.
Haven't yet read the comments, but the last day or two have moved me from blasé to freaking-the-fuck-out. I've now donated $100 to that getting-registered-latinos-to-vote-in-Florida group and am hosting a GOTV phone-banking party Sunday here in Vienna. Jesus.
You have to start each call by playing Falco's Vienna Calling.
"Hi, I'm from the land of Hitler. Now go and vote or I'll keep calling back with Falco b-sides until you do. Thanks for supporting Hillary Clinton and the Democratic ticket."
105: If the election breaks well Sam Wang should literally decapitate Nate Silver and eat his brains with a fork.
This made me laugh.
Okay, Halford 122-123 helped a little, but please, give me something more. I'm gathering like 5 left-socialist SPÖ party members with good American accents here to make GOTV calls, and need to think this matters. Give me something! Arrrgh jesus I was doing so well about being all "we got this, it's all good" until a couple days ago.
TBH it might be more effective if you found ones with strong Australian accents and had them call people up to endorse Trump.
Dammit! Austrian. I swear autocorrect did that.
You think an Austrian accent is going to make Trump supporters change their mind?
"It vould not be a good idee-ah if you do not vote. Ve haf vays of making you vote."
115: At least in my timeline the article that seemed to finally push people over the edge was this piece of crap in the WaPo: What is this election missing? Empathy for Trump voters..
My favorite response tweets:
Ian Millhiser:
What this election is missing is empathy for the people Donald Trump wants to deport, jail, or kill.
and Kashana:
We're six days away from an article called "I showed some empathy for Trump voters and they shot me anyway.
But because we have clever tweets and they've got the FBI I am going to engage in some rage-post therapy because I can feel all many weasel-faced suburbanites around here who were uncomfortable with Trump becoming inured to the need to vote for an unstable sexually-assaulting bully because otherwise the world's greatest email monster would win. Also because they are morons. Also racists. Also sexists.
But because we have clever tweets and they've got the FBI
A tweet I saw someone repost on FB was about how this will be remembered as the election in which the KKK, the KGB, and the FBI all supported the same candidate. That seems to sum it up well.
Yeah, so about James "I've Got a Righteous Stick Up My Butt So I'm Not Listening To Any Corrupt Uppity Black People Who Are My Superiors When They Talk Precedent and Rules And Shit Like That" Comey. Fuck that fucker. If Trump whens he will go down in world history and not in the good oral sex way.
I know he has that straight shooter rep--which was sort my possition but not any longer. The combo of gratuitous chiding press conference in July, releasing tons of investigatory material, *not* agreeing to put the FBI name behind the Russia hacking us stuff because it was too close to the election, and then this fucking stunt have made it clear to me that he is actually quite the hack.
I mean really, really, really fuck that guy.
But the people WHO ARE REALLY PISSING ME OFF are the friendly folks in the media (surprise, surprise). Holy shit, their little precious fucking heads exploding for days after the Comey fart bomb so that all the low-information fucktards (see 131 last) heard about the 2nd weekend before the election was E Fucking MAILS. Plus a billion other sins. The grand fucking culmination of 20 + years of iniquity. Never before has a more vile group of groaning lackeys of satan had such a place in the Sun*. They truly are enemies of the Enlightenment and deeply disinterested in democracy and governance.
*Other than during most periods of history but never mind that for now.
My favorite excuse that I have seen several of these fuckpigs of multiple iniquities deploy is that reporting on Trump's constant stream of lies and confusions isn't worth it because "it wouldn't matter to his supporters anyway." Awful, awful stuff.
119: "This is Barack Obama, and I'm reminding you that when I rock out I rock out to 99.9 FM The Hawk...god dammit, Joe, I just can't any more of these."
can't do, even. But "I just can't" works well enough.
135: Yes, it's awful. We're still going to win.
And then there was Chris "100 email stories isn't quite enough" Cillizza writing this masterpiece of self-awareness the other day about some WaPo/ABC tracking poll results: "How the heck can voters think Donald Trump is more honest than Hillary Clinton?" (no link).
Gawd*.
*The other day Cilizza tweeted: "From Elliot Ness to Clarice Starling, the image of the FBI--unflappable, smart and relentlessly fair--has been sterling." I kid you not. A Treasury agent and a fictional character.
137.last: Yeah, I think. But Jesus.
So anyway, some do the oppo dump with The Apprentice Tape with Trump using the n word and get it over with....
Anyway, door-knocking tomorrow, which is better therapy...
If Hillary wins, does Comey resign or is it awkward turtle for four years? She can't exactly force him out (PR-wise) but he has to know he can fuck right off.
I need a healthy balance of Megan and Stormcrow in my daily Unfogged diet.
Yeah, they both really need to comment more.
142: I should hope so in this case, but the director doesn't normally resign for the new president to fill the post - there's a ten-year limit on tenure only. Reflective of their historical untouchability going back to JE Hoover.
132: If Trump wins, that really sets a bad precedent. What happens if in the future the FBI and the KGB disagree on who should be president?
If Trump wins, that really sets a bad precedent.
Well, yes.
What happens if in the future the FBI and the KGB disagree on who should be president?
Have they ever agreed before?
Hm, 1964 is admittedly a tough call on that. I don't think all three were aligned even then, though.
KKK is Democrat till CRA in 1964. JFK bites it in '63. Clear as day.
If you call from Vienna, FEC regulations require disclosing that you're a Wiener.
154 Do they require a pic as proof?
Okay, only Megan and Stormcrow can post on the election until Tuesday. The rest of us will have to stick to more important issues, like quantifying exactly how much AC/DC rocks.
I try to be even-keel in my judgements, and when I don't have any reason to think otherwise, I try to be optimistic. But six months of both inexplicable horrifying news and hearing constant freakouts (on FB, not here) has broken me.
I'm impressed when JP rants about the media that he manages to be be precise and witty. If I were try to express my feelings about the media it would just consist of "JDJOEOHKJHDSjasdfjfdsa" as I bashed my hands on the keyboard.
quantifying exactly how much AC/DC rocks.
on the Hard/Heavy scale.
I keep seeing numbers of huge increases in early voting by latinos in AZ, FL, and NV, with a high enough differential in NV (based on polled spread of Latinos) that it might already be impossible for Trump to win the state. In FL more total Latinos have voted early than voted in the entire 2012 tally (early + Election Day). But then Ezra tweeted in response to argument in favor of Clinton ground game, "I thought this too, but 2012-like look of early voting is making me doubt Clinton's GOTV advantage will be so huge." I have no idea what he's basing "2012-like" on, aside from NC where they eliminated polling places.
157: Weighed Mohs/Richter Scale.
Real fans use moment magnitude.
But I did just get some of the best election news in a while.
Dick Morris: Trump Ahead Or Tied For 284 Electoral Votes -- 14 More Than He Needs
If you can't trust Dick Morris on polling, who can you trust?
156: I'm actually broken as well. The amount of psychic energy this fucking thing has consumed is staggering (my choice to let it, of course). Doesn't help that I am just emerging from an utterly consuming year of work (culminating event November 1st) so my defenses are worn down.
I am pretty sure it will be a win (barring some other massive fuckwittery) but from my current perspective the night of a Trump victory would be the worst day of my life. And I am a freaking relatively well off older white male. I just can't imagine how it would feel for most women, minorities, Muslims, you name it. Overly dramatic I know (and part of the dread is knowing that even with an HRC win I live in a country where such a large percentage of people would deign vote for the mega-creep... and what that bodes for the future).
So part of my media rage is that they have contributed (for 20+ years actually) so much to getting us to this point. I just hope that there will be some tendency for the "undecided" people in the booth who have even a modicum of self-awareness to be thinking of just what an unfit asshole he is (which they all know), and not "oh that corrupt woman". And the media have had a big hand in making that even a possibility.
Trump needs 270, but Hillary now needs 271, because of course the woman has to work harder to get the same reward as the man.
That's 99.6% of male earnings, so a big improvement over the 78% you usually see.
One other point re: media. Clinton's two polling surges came after the Dem Convention and during the 'Debate" period. So admittedly the first is common and the 2nd pretty much coincided with the "grab 'em by the pussy" period, but in both instances, many more voters saw Clinton without the pathetic wanker screen of the media.
I'm withholding judgement on the media until I see if anybody but Fox and the WSJ report the FBI leak about how she is about to be indicted for killing babies and puppies with specially hardened copies of the U.S. Constitution.
Let's all read the complete analysis of how Fox News could have possibly made a mistake the hurts Clinton in the week before the election. Some mysteries are too deep for lesser minds.
There is a piece in Mother Jones this month by the same guy who wrote the article about taking a job at a private prison a while back. This time he's undercover with the crazy militia types playing dress-up on the Arizona-Mexico border. It basically confirms every stereotype I have about these people. Highly delusional, extremely xenophobic, and walking a fine line between ridiculous and dangerous.
My favorite bit is how the militia from Colorado don't get along with the militia from Arizona due to bickering about who is supposed to be in charge.
If only there were some supra-state authority to which a unified chain of command could be subordinated.
I don't think Arizona is ready to join the EU yet.
You think this is unified? Some people just don't know what's good for them.
Monsieur, imagine I made that joke from the alternate reality where the Eurocorps itself isn't a joke. Regardless, I don't think you want to let Arizona into la Francophonie.
Maybe if the EU took Arizona, we could get, I don't know, Ireland in return?
Why not just shove Arizona and California together and make a new state by combining their names using parts from each according to their relative populations. (So, it would be called "California" but the last 'a' would be from Arizona.)
169: "Highly delusional, extremely xenophobic, and walking a fine line between ridiculous and dangerous."
So, just like most of homo sap.
170: The constitution stipulates who is commander in chief of the various state militias. Somebody should tell them.
Watching Werner Herzog film on visits with the boy. Easier than explaining Germans to him without the example.
This is very much like "The Life Aquatic".
"Can we find a guy to kiss the ground?"
"Yes. If we go to the rift zone in Africa."
If this inspires the next generation of scientists, science is going to be pretty fucked up.
For one thing, the vulcanologists spend more time on paleontology than you'd expect.
This appears to be scrupulously well-sourced:
Melania Trump was paid for 10 modeling jobs in the United States worth $20,056 that occurred in the seven weeks before she had legal permission to work in the country, according to detailed accounting ledgers, contracts and related documents from 20 years ago provided to The Associated Press.
I admit that it's actually milder than I presumed Melania's immigration violations to be, but I still feel vindicated. I knew her story didn't make any kind of sense.
186: It may well be worse. That's just all they could establish conclusively.
185: On their own or with Herzog's prodding?
I can't tell. But I think Herzog can get anybody to do anything.
"Film in North Korea?"
"Why not, it has a dormant volcano. Is it hard to get in?"
Something like a quarter of this is about North Korea, and not the volcano part.
My favorite part of vulcanology is when they explain cargo cults.
To be fair, there are a lot of volcanoes in Melanesia. More than in North Korea, for sure.
I kind of want to go to Vantu and bring as much stuff as possible just to cheer them up.
I think Saturday is now Family Werner Herzog night for as long as Netflix can hook us up.
Maybe I should google a bit to see why a movie about a guy being eaten by a bear got a R rating.
Now that I write that out, I think I know the answer.
I don't think they actually show the bear eating him. Just the audio.
But I haven't seen the movie and don't intend to.
Yes. Maybe the one about the cave paintings would be better.
198: I think they don't even play the audio. Instead, they show Herzog and Treadwell's ex listening to the audio.
They may actually play the audio as well (it's been a while), but I think the above is correct.
If they don't play the audio, did the rest of it look good for a fifth grader?
Somebody needs to make a movie about being eaten by bears that's for kids.
There's probably an animated version of Goldilocks you can use.
I don't want to normalize breaking and entering for him.
Maybe there's an alternate version where the bears eat her.
I wonder if the version where they don't eat her isn't the alternate version.
That would fit the tone of a lot of traditional fairy tales. Is this one in the Brothers Grimm? Probably not, I guess.
PSA: Parenting is not for wimps. I'm on tia duty and after 24 hours with a 2, 5, and 7-year-old -- with adult backup -- I'm once again reminded how many things you have to juggle with young kids.
Also, if you have to listen to one song 472 times on repeat for hours and hours during Extended Bedtime, turns out Hey Jude is not bad.
I just want Herzog to narrate it. Don't care who gets eaten or not.
Maybe send him an email or something? He might be down.
I think Brother Bear starts off with the protagonist's brother getting eaten by a bear. It also featured Bob and Doug McKenzie, eh.
Maybe he just gets killed by a bear, but not eaten. Which sucks for the bear.
Maybe we'll just watch Love at Stake. That was pretty good.
In case anyone thought the total disaster that was North County St. Louis policing in the Ferguson era was even kinda-sorta-solved, I present to you this embarassment.
(I actually have no opinion on the actual case at issue -- there are just way too many question makers for any of it to be clear, at least to me. What IS clear is that the police hired a lawyer who made wildly inaccurate and unconstitutional threats to the TV station's lawyer. If you scroll down below the news story to the embedded documents, the second lawyer letter/e-mail is worth reading.)
For all we know, Hillary Clinton killed that guy. It's the duty of the press to display the photograph, per FBI precedent, unless it can be proven that Donald Trump is president of the United States.
Proven to whose satisfaction? For a lot of his followers he could just claim to be president and they'd believe him.
Average white, male FBI agent standard.
Via djw at LGM a great rant from someone he was canvassing:
Look, I get it, you white people had a hard time with Obama being president so you need to racist president. I get it. I don't like it but I get it. But what I don't get is why you needed a racist who is so goddamn crazy and stupid! Couldn't you find a racist who could actually know how to run the damn government? I mean, I wouldn't vote for him-he'd still be bad for people like me-but at least he'd know what he's doing? What good does it do the damn white people when Trump shits the bed? It's not like there's some other special country they move to when he takes this country down. We get a black president and he does a pretty good job, and your response is murder-suicide? You white people need to get smarter about how you do this racism thing.Mine experience much more boring in the leafy suburbs of P'burgh.
209: Oh, huh, I had assumed it was originally a Grimm story and therefore had to have had a violent ending, with the obvious moral you little shithead don't fuck with bears' shit. O, what we mislearn.
On that note, I won't believe Trump is president until I see his presidential stigmata.
223: Ah. Those guys seem to be a lot smarter than the median Trump voter, if no less crazy.
Herzog definitely doesn't play the audio in the film. He listens to it with headphones on camera with the girlfriend and says, "You must never listen to this... You should not keep it, you should destroy it."
224: The Democrats always did elect smarter racists when we had all the bigger racists.
227: I assume she destroyed it. If anybody told me to destroy something in that voice, I'd assume I had to carry it to Mount Doom.
You really don't learn much about volcanoes from the movie. Lots of great visuals of volcanoes though.
I doubt many people watch Herzog movies to learn things.
I learned that cargo cults have schismatics and that North Korea will let you wander around filming shit for values of "you" that are "Werner Herzog".
Those are valuable facts to learn about volcanoes.
Also that there are only three places on earth where you can look directly at magma, none of them close to an IHOP.
The complement of IHOP is Waffle House, so the South must be unusually volcanic.
I doubt many people watch Herzog movies to learn things, except that ecstatic truth, elusive and mysterious, which binds all living things in this vast and unknowable emptiness.
228: Where did all the smart racists go?
They either died or learned to be less overt about their racism.
Today's Presidential Election appears to be extremely close run.
241. Eerily like Clinton vs. Trump. Maybe a run-off would have been a better idea here.
Maybe anything would have been a better idea here. (Dance-off? Guest appearances on Survivor? Jeopardy challenge match?)
158.last yes, that's been making me crazy.... Uh, things should look worse thanks to scotus, you glib bastards
Panel discussion with Tooze about the rolling euro crisis and other things. I was struck by this around 1:29:
the breakdown in the internal coherence of the Republican party can be traced pretty presisely to the Paulson Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac moment and its repercussions into 2009 with the Tea Party movement [...] goes a long way to explain the rage of the right wing in America at the complete illegitimacy of what was done in the crisis phase and the very invidious role played by the Republican party with regard to its supposed base in that period.
224: That's Selah's family's home turf and I know those neighborhoods a bit as a result. Nia and I phonebanked southern Ohio college student voters (mostly) last night. Every identifiably black voice corresponded with a clear understanding of how important this election is.
Candidate Donald J. Trump
Coats daily with butter his rump
His farts are the worst,
Not a staccato burst
But a lone oleaginous thwump!
Inspired by Edward Lear on the Old Man From Calcutta?
I don't think "oleaginous thwump" makes a lot of sense.
247. Lear's accompanying drawing does look surprisingly like Trump, now you mention it.
224: Mine experience much more boring in the leafy suburbs of P'burgh.
Which reminds me: has the Philadelphia transit strike been resolved? One was worried about its impact on the Philly Democratic vote.
I shall check!
Well, from what I can tell, SEPTA authorities asked for a court injunction on Friday and were denied by the court, which has said it will revisit the issue on Monday if things remain unresolved.
So, uh, maybe tomorrow the judge rules that the strike must end? And everybody (the workers) are just going to say, "Oh. Okay."
This rather sucks as a means to resolve a labor dispute. Nonetheless. Voting.
I'm not sure what the justification is but a union making it harder to vote in the main Democratic stronghold of a swing state can go fuck itself as far as I'm concerned.
The issue seems to be something about pensions. The timing does suck, to be sure. I don't know enough about it: if the timing is simply because union negotiations are going on now (which is presumably the case), and management is attempting to cheat people out of their due pension rewards (I don't know), well, fair enough.
Ideally a court injunction would put a hold on the whole shebang until Wednesday, that's all. Let the dispute continue after that.
More ideally, such an injunction would have come down on Friday to begin with: people kind of need advance notice to know whether they can get to the polls via public transit on Tuesday. Expecting them to be on top of a Monday ruling is a bit much.
249: Huh, wrong limerick. The one I know is:
There was an old man from Calcutta,
Who coated his tonsils with butter,
Converting his snore,
From a thunderous roar,
To a soft, oleaginous mutter.
Loomis said this timing specifically maximizes their leverage but I'm guessing that most in the managerial class view the election of a Republican as a plus (although I don't know if that applies to the management of a city transit agency.)
I'm super pissed at Hillary right now. There were supposed to be two more damning tapes of Trump doing stupid shit that were going to be released. I was really looking forward to that. But, so far, nothing, and time is just about up.
Was it all just a big lie, or are they sitting on the shelf next to the Whitey Tape?
You haven't seen the one of him fucking a dog?
"Have you seen that bitch? So ugly. I don't think so, folks."
Spike, I assume you're not serious.
In good news: Al Franken has said that the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on Comey's FBI. Excellent, if it happens. The FBI under Comey is insupportable. If he can't get his organization under control, someone else needs to step in to do so.
You know who else used antisemetic campaign imagery?
Oh FFS. Sure is a good thing we spent a week of national media coverage on this!
My favorite is the guy who shouts "gun" at an event covered by the Secret Service to get rid of a protestor.
261: No shit. Comey's behavior is unacceptable. Not a lot of voters are glued to the last minute news about this sort of thing.
Oh FFS [2]. I'm pissed off and embarrassed that they're from my state.
OTOH, this must have been a statisfying headline to write: "In final days, Trump is obsessed with vengeance, kept away from Twitter by staff."
I thought this was an interesting perspective on the Podesta emails: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fat63bqvG8
I'm not that concerned. Most common tight maps are 269-269 or 274-264. I haven't seen a map with 270 or 271. If it did matter I'm sure Bernie would have a nice long talk with them (which may be all they're looking for, especially the second guy who saw all the attention the first guy got.)
263. I wonder how many early voters voted Trump based on the Comey "Emails: The Sequel" letter?
One of those electors seems to be an Elementalist.
"She doesn't care about my land or my air or my fire or my water."
Don't judge, Ajay. Only very high-level players have access to 'electricity' or 'tertiary-sector employment' elementals.
If anyone is in the mood for crazy this V/ox D/ay post is pretty funny. http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/11/bracing-for-impact-ii.html
Maybe he's just having trouble catching certain types of Pokémon
I know where there's a nest but it's in London.
I'm not that concerned. Most common tight maps are 269-269 or 274-264.
I think it's unlikely to matter (I still believe that the final electoral college result won't be close), but it's the narcissism of it that annoys me. I just think, at this point in the campaign, it's not about what you (random person) think are reasonable compromises to make -- particularly if you are a white man -- have some respect for the other members of the political coalition.
It's like, in that classic tweet about asking friends to vote on dinner, if, after the first vote one the pizza-voters said, "actually, if there are going to be mushrooms on the pizza, I'm changing my vote to 'abstain.'" Not okay.
"Actually, if there are going to be mushrooms on the pizza, I'm changing my vote to Hitler."
Obama is trolling Trump about how Trump's staff took away twitter.
This was reported earlier (that a bunch of FBI agents were pursuing the allegations in Clinton Cash) but I'm surprised to see how badly they look in this WSJ story: http://www.wsj.com/articles/secret-recordings-fueled-fbi-feud-in-clinton-probe-1478135518
I guess I'm out of touch, but I was surprised to find out that fewer than 50 percent of House Democrats are white males, compared to 87% of House Republicans.
(Let us all pause to note that PA is the 6th largest state by population and we have exactly zero women in our Congressional delegation. Other types of diversity ain't so hot
either.)
Zero? What happened to Allyson Schwartz? I thought she was in there for life.
I love how that's now the classic tweet. I really feel like it's something deeply profound about our national situation.
I was surprised to find out that fewer than 50 percent of House Democrats are white males,
This is partly a side-effect of Republican gerrymandering, isn't it?
285: On the race front, yes, at least somewhat. On the gender front? Aside from places with really large men's prisons or women's colleges,* I can't think of any factor that would really swing the gender ratio in a Congressional district (which is now up to 750K people). Maybe military bases? Although an awful lot of women serve now, and military families have always lived on/near bases.
*Both of which are mitigated by the fact that neither of these groups necessarily contains a lot of voters.
I'll be traveling and without my computer for the rest of the week so I'll be getting all my election related news from Unfogged threads. Don't let me down, Mineshaft!
Well, here and twitter, but you can't trust the twitterers.
247: Yeah, just wanted to make a limerick with "oleaginous" in it. (Based, obviously, on the more profane version of "Calcutta")
In case y'all was wondering, everyone in the brokerage industry is dreading the prospect of a Trump win. Such a nasty election.
Yeah, I back up 290. I've been doing my job since before the 2004 election and this is the first time CEOs haven't said "Oh, we have plans for either election outcome and we have preferences (code for R) but we can make it work no matter what" and nope it's all just about surviving even for corporations right now.
[Exeunt all. Sound of bunker doors closing within.]
219: I was a little disappointed someone missed an opportunity to refer to Arkell v. Pressdram.
I think it's unlikely to matter (I still believe that the final electoral college result won't be close), but it's the narcissism of it that annoys me.
Agreed. What a couple of preening peacocks.
I thought the whole "Bernie Bros" thing was overplayed in the primary, but it is surprising that two of them managed to become Clinton electors.
I can't think of any factor that would really swing the gender ratio in a Congressional district (which is now up to 750K people). Maybe military bases? Although an awful lot of women serve now, and military families have always lived on/near bases.
Agreed - the ratio's normally about 2 men to 1 woman just for army personnel living on base, and a lot of the more senior soldiers and officers will of course live off-base with their families. And the bases are big but they aren't that big compared to a congressional district - Fort Bragg only has 50,000 people on it, which works out as only 16,000 "excess" men on base, only 2% of the district's population even if you ignore the likelihood that the area around the base will have a lot of "excess" women (i.e. wives living off base).
Comey covers his ass!
http://m.chinapost.com.tw/international/2016/11/07/483237/In-last.htm
Speaking of awful white people, doesn't this guy look a little less athletic than you'd expect for a serial killer? Guns are making the south lazy.
This article, though not at all about serial killing, is one of the few I've seen that places the blame for Trump where I place it.
It's always "look at all these disaffected white people, a tour of the last forty years" without looking mentioning the deliberate snow job done by Republicans in the last eight.
Good news: Philadelphia transit strike is over at 5 a.m. this monring. Regular service resumes election day.
Bad news: FREE SPRINGSTEEN concert tonight, with Hillary also there, at Independence Hall, eight blocks of center city closed off to cars starting at 10 a.m., and mass transit won't be fully operational. People are going to spend the night before the election involuntarily camping out there.
Jon Bon Jovi, featuring Bruce Springsteen.
|| STATISTICAL HISTORY BREAK
Charles Fort, the famous Victorian chronicler of the uncanny and unusual, probably observed or studied more bizarre events than any other person of his time. Common among these were rains of fish. Inexplicable at the time, these are now believed to have occurred after a whirlwind sucks up water from a nearby lake or sea and deposits it (with fish) on the land. Fort's rigorous descriptions of these events, however, led him to make a very interesting statistical observation. Assuming that fish were distributed at random across the affected area, with the average rate of fish-fall remaining constant and the probability of a fish landing in one square yard unaffected by the number of fish it already contained, Fort recorded that some parts of the affected area would contain no or very few fish, most would contain several, while a few would contain a very large number. Meticulously recording the number of fish in each square yard, he found that, regardless of the total number of fish which had fallen or the size of each fish, they would always be found according to a very specific pattern.
This pattern of course became known as a Poisson distribution.
|>
Unusually serious response/standpiping from a guy who usually tries not to be serious but has his own areas of competence which he tries to respect break:
There was a guy named Poisson who did work on this before Charles Fort was born.
Shame on the South African government for imprisoning Springsteen.
And the Gaussian distribution was named after Carl Friedrich Normal.
The hypothesis that the amount of disrespect I intended towards the noble profession of statistics was zero should not be rejected at this point.
ISTR reading mock biographies of "Forgotten Pioneers of Science" such as Jean-Baptiste Moiré, discoverer of Moiré fringes, and Juan Herrera de Torsion, who invented the Torsion balance.
While you guys are arguing stats I am in Dubai with Chani and I have several beers in me. Life is good. For now.
302: JFC. Elsewhere I'm arguing with people who are convinced that Clinton is at the center of a vast conspiracy at all levels of government and society to rig the election, maintain the world's biggest patronage machine, and murder dozens or rivals and whistleblowers. Whereas in the real world, you've got a Democratic rock star and unions actively making it harder to vote in a Democratic stronghold in a swing state. Yes, tell me more about how they've managed to hide all that evidence and cover up all their perfidy for 30 years without getting caught. (I get that the concert is a campaign event; presumably the campaign knows better than I do. But it sure looks dumb, taken with everything else there.)
I believe some Democratic PAC bought free Uber and Lyft to the polls for everyone in Philadelphia on election day, making for a nice controlled experiment in something or other.
I guess it's not actually "controlled."
If half of the rides went to Delaware, it could be.
I personally hope it does well just to piss off Atrios.
I just learned that "thunder mug" was once slang for a chamber pot. I'm sharing that because I assume it will be useful to most people here.
It's really striking how common it once was to sleep with an uncovered porcelain bowl of cold urine under your bed.
Check this out. Especially the last graph. For all the prattling on about how Democrats have lost the white working class, the last graph reveals that they have never gotten a majority of white no-college voters since 1980. In fact, the percentage voting Democratic has been remarkably constant at about 40%. And the only reason Bill Clinton won in that demographic is because Perot selectively siphoned off those voters. This really puts a dagger in the "Democrats have lost the white working class" bullshit. They never had the white working class.
They certainly had the technology to make a lid.
How much is a lid these days anyway?
The $6 Million Dollar Pan: "We can put a lid on it. We have the technology."
Dad never talks about having anything like a chamber pot around, though he complains about having to run outside in the cold. I wonder if his parents didn't have one and just didn't give them to the kids in order to prevent spills and because a little cold isn't going to hurt the kids anyway.
319: I didn't think they had lids. Maybe they did.
They used to have them in UK prisons until about ten years ago.
That sounds unpleasant for the inmates and downright dangerous for the guards.
It was pretty unpleasant for the inmates. First thing to happen every morning was "slopping out", i.e. carrying your chamberpot out of your cell to where it could be emptied out. Slopping out while in a shared cell was eventually ruled a breach of human rights. I don't know about it being dangerous for the guards - you mean because they could chuck the contents at them?
Chamber pots with lids are not unknown, but they were never standard issue. The one under my bed when I was a child certainly didn't have one.
I don't know how often that happened. Probably not that much because a) the guards wouldn't be standing right there on the galleries, they'd be some distance away b) missing and hitting your fellow prisoners instead would be a bad idea, c) loss of privileges and so on wouldn't be nice either.
You could just put a dinner plate on top. Don't use the good dishes.
330: I mentioned it because feces flinging seems to be mentioned fairly often in articles about prisons in the U.S. and that's where somebody would have to make a deliberate effort to save their shit.
Yes, you wouldn't want to lose your shit in that context would you?
I'm thinking I should try to see if I can think of anything to say about unicycles.
Call me a neoliberal sellout, but I really love indoor plumbing.
332: Happened, at least historically, over there, too.
336: except rather than chucking it at people, they were smearing it on the walls of their own cells, a level to which even the average chimpanzee generally does not descend.
Nobody ever beats a chimpanzee when it goes to empty a chamber pot.
300 is right-on.
This from Douthat really interested me on that topic, because it creates a logical case about abortion/Trump that makes basically no sense whatsoever. You really get the feel for how Douthat's mind works: He wants to be radically anti-abortion, and he wants to be against Trump, and he can't rationalize the obvious contradiction, so he just makes shit up.
The strongest counterpoint to this line of argument comes from the Roman Catholic catechism's teaching on just war. As the Catholic writer John Zmirak noted in the aftermath of the Planned Parenthood shootings last years, the church does not allow nations to take up arms and go to war merely when they have a high moral cause on their side. Justice is necessary, but it is not sufficient: Peaceful means of ending the evil in question need to have been exhausted, there must be serious prospects of military success, and (crucially) "the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated."
How can he possibly make the case that a Trump presidency is a worse evil than the murder of millions of innocents? I mean, that might be true, but if I held the beliefs he professes to hold, I'd vote Trump.
I don't think he's making a case that a Trump presidency is worse than the murder of millions of innocents. He's making the case that a Trump presidency to stop abortion is the functional equivalent of shooting up a Planned Parenthood. He's not bound by the analogy ban.
His (supposed) objection to shooting up PP clinics is that it wouldn't produce results - not that it is too extreme. As he says, Catholic "just war" theory clearly contemplates great evils being done in the service of a higher good.
And it's very likely that a Trump presidency would lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade - a point that's so obvious that Douthat doesn't even try to argue against it.
He's basing the case more on that peaceful, civil means have not been exhausted and explicitly considering "results" to include not just abortions, but also the general civic life of the Republic.
In the Catholic ethical tradition, you wouldn't even need to reason through the likely proportionality of the effects (good: preventing abortions, bad: murdering people and generating civic disorder) to prohibit shooting up PP. Shooting up pp would be prohibited on the grounds that murder is the primary effect of the action: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/ .
Finally, a simple answer to the thing with the trolley.
The house I grew up in had running water from the 1940s onwards but still had potties under the beds when I was a child. I think it was just that going from your bedroom to the toilet could be quite a cold trip and also might perhaps wake up five or six other people. We got central heating when I was about 7 or 8 and the pots sort of faded away.
Finally that fat man can stop edging away from me when we stand on overpasses.
OT: In relation to new job, I'm reading briefs filed by a TX law firm. For some reason, they consistently format case names not as Doe v. Roe, but instead as Doe v. Roe. Is this some generalized TX weirdness, or am I just dealing with a very strange firm? Or do people do that anywhere else?
Aside from small children and middle-aged+ men, is having to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night very common?
I had no idea people felt so strongly about italicized 'v's.
It's weirdly disturbing to read.
Many people italicize Latin abbreviations. But the entire name of a court case should be italicized, no? So this firm is just acknowledging that the versus should be double-italicized.
347: That's a minority style, but not all that uncommon and not Texas-specific. The US Solicitor General does it that way. The First Circuit does as well but they use underlining instead of italics.
And taking the position that two italics make a roman? I've never seen that before.
I too think it is the rarely seen double italicization which cancels itself out. Like when you see an article called "What's The Deal With Monsoons? Watching Seinfeld in Bangladesh".
It takes at least two Romans to equal a Sicilian when death is on the line.
Oh, huh. Looking at 355, I have seen that. Fair enough, it makes sense.
The way to test it is to find a Texan who is about to murder somebody and get them to legally change their name into italics first.
And at these prices, you won't see many more!
Surely the Romans are the most Italic Italics.
And taking the position that two italics make a roman? I've never seen that before.
I have always used that rule when quoting other comments. So, for example, if I was quoting somebody saying "Everybody should watch Grizzly Man" I would quote it as:
Everybody should watch Grizzly Man.
I've heard that small children maybe shouldn't watch Grizzly Man.
347: in addition to 353, it's also house style at some white shoe NYC firms, for sure Paul Weiss and I think S&C. I always assumed it was like the no brown m+ms in provision in the Van Halen tour rider -- not designed to do anything on the merits but to ensure anality amongst staff and demonstrate anality to courts.
362: Yeah, once Ned gave an example longer than one letter long, I recognized it as perfectly normal. I just hadn't ever noticed 'v.' italicized as foreign before, or it being unitalicized as a result, and being confused about the specific instance I fumbled the general rule.
Julian Assange tries to justify himself. I don't agree with everything he is saying here, but he is a smart guy and it is worth paying attention to what he has to say.
Does he say anything beyond "The President was a Democrat when I became an enemy of the US government, so I am dedicated to supporting the Republican Party"?
Assange and Counterpunch can really go fuck themselves, especially on the day before the election.
but he is a smart guy
I assume that he is, but if there's evidence of that in this interview, I missed it. (To be fair, I skimmed half of it.)
One of the tells when people are bullshitting is when they refer to the contents of a document that is available on the Internet but don't link to it. Mr. Transparency apparently doesn't think it's important to refer people to primary documents.
Speaking of the election, can somebody remind me of how to vote on the judicial age thing? Or rather, tell me if there's any reason it's wrong to have a 74-year-old judge. Because that doesn't seem very bad to me?
Increasing the age/term limit each time the guy in charge hits it is how illiberal democracies in the developing world function.
369- I didn't bother to check, but I don't think Assange is the one who published the interview.
370: The trial lawyers association, and a judge who doesn't want to retire, dreamed this one up. The whole point is a "yes" vote will allow one or possibly two Supreme Court justices who favor personal injury plaintiffs over evil corporations stay on the job a few more years. So, it's up to you.
(The ballo asks whether you vote in favor of a retirement age of 75. It doesn't mention that there is currently a retirement age of 70.)
70 is a bit young for a mandatory retirement age for a judge. I say go with the trial lawyers, unless that particular judge truly sucks.
Most of this is fairly common place, though it is a pretty neat history lesson, but the bit about perineal tears was horrifying. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/05/the-big-con-what-is-really-at-stake-on-election-day
I'm a little frustrated that the wording is apparently intentionally obtuse.
My school is in the midst of a kerfluffle about whether or not it constitutes a faculty-sponsored political event to take a group photo of everyone (who chooses to be) wearing a pantsuit tomorrow.
Instead of gently directing it off-campus, we decided to maximize the fluffle and be melodramatic about it. CANCELLED!
That said, I am genuinely curious if this is protected free speech or if the university can say this is a political event that can be banned.
I happened to look at Wikileaks twitter yesterday and they were all in on the "How could he review 650k emails in 8* days?" Had a whole explanation of how you need 3 min per email, support staff, over 1000 people to do it right and obviously they didn't so Clinton is corrupt.
*Best comment I saw on this, I forget where, was that centuries from now it will be celebrated as the new miracle of Hanukkah that saved us from another of history's madmen.
Next time somebody asks me to resend them a particular email, I'm going to say it will take me three minutes times the number of emails I have to read back in the archive to find it.
I'm a little frustrated that the wording is apparently intentionally obtuse.
Me too, but I do take 374.2 as a general rule. I suppose I should check which judge it is exactly.
https://electionbettingodds.com/
Angry middle-aged white men who look like hobos and support Trump: Not just American.
I just got a robocall for Lenny McCalister, who is very possibly the Trump's mythical black voter.
On googling, nope. He's a black Republican, but not supporting Trump as near as I can tell.
The judge in question is Pennsylvania Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas G. Saylor, who turns 70 on December 14. Justice Max Baer turns 70 December 24 next year. The other justices are all much younger. Saylor is a Republican, Baer is a Democrat.
All of our neighboring states except Delaware and West Virginia have 70 as the judicial retirement age (according to Ballotpedia). It's not clear to me when this provision was added to our constitution.
We have a judge named Max Baer and nobody told me?
I guess I should pay attention when I vote.
Somebody find me a lawyer residing in PA who is named Irene Ryan so I can put her on the Supreme Court.
Also, get me the power to appoint people to the Supreme Court.
Update: I didn't make it out to canvass this weekend, but I did just do 50 calls to Arizona voters. Mostly good responses. Majority of people I talked to had already voted.
The funniest was a woman who answered and then said it wasn't a good time to talk because she was in an airport bathroom. I could hear her voice echoing in the stall and a child trying to talk to her. I wonder why on earth she answered the phone. All I can think of is that she was waiting for an important call and too harried to glance at the Caller ID before answering.
(She did say she had already voted. Phew!)
Watching the livestream of Hillary in Philadelphia. She is urging people to still volunteer by phonebanking and helping people get to the polls.
She's done talking, and now the Obamas are on stage with her, waving. Man, I'm going to miss them.
While I'm serial posting, anecdata alert: An 80-year-old Republican woman I know re-registered as independent because she hates Trump so much. She also refused to let the local Republican party put signs on her lawn.
I am cautiously optimistic that she'll have a small but meaningful amount of company tomorrow. (I don't know how she's voting, but it's either not at all or for HRC.)
394: My best was a woman (we were there for her son, actually) who was clearly a supporter and volunteered that her hisband was a Republican but he was voting for HRC because "he at least has a little bit of sense".
It is all so fucking unbelievable--the gas-lighting of half a country (including some of the media).
And I think my mom, aunt and cousin have shamed my sad-sack uncle in Ohio into not voting for Trump ( but think he is staying home because he cannot bring himself to vote for HRC because who the fuck knows). In Ohio.
Starting to think we won't see those tax returns.
As soon as the never-ending audit is over.
Thank you again to our canvassers, and to those who have successfully shamed relatives into not voting Trump.
There are some really lovely, heartfelt comments on this NYT article on the Hispanic voter surge. Click on "Reader Picks".
My God, just when I thought this election couldn't get any worse, Trump (credibly?) claims a Belichick endorsement.
Trump is seeking to deflate voter turnout.
Don't even play. I'm so dispirited.
And we're off! Clinton wins Dixville Notch, 4-2.
FPPs, can we please have a new thread for results?