At this point, it’s pretty much indisputable that something has snapped in George Will’s mind and that he has abandoned all pretext of conforming to journalistic standards of honesty. In fact, I seriously question whether or not he’s lost his grip on reality.
If Breitbart.com is saying it, it is almost guaranteed that it isn’t true or that it never happened. This is another one of those cases.
Maybe I’m wrong, but my impression growing up in the 1970’s and 1980’s is that no one would feel the need to ask whether or not the poor (or anyone other than felons) should be allowed to vote. That’s changed now.
The editors at The Nation spell out why Republican control of the Senate would be a disaster.
Ramesh Ponnuru is upset with Ohio Governor John Kasich for supporting the Medicaid expansion of ObamaCare. This is presumably because helping poor people pay for health insurance is the most objectionable part of the Affordable Care Act for committed conservatives.
Andrew Sullivan should have heeded the advice of his readers not to dip a toe into the #gamergate controversy, but I did at least find one part of his argument interesting. As gays and lesbians enjoy increased acceptance, there has been a corresponding loss on the countercultural end, with gay neighborhoods, establishments, and traditions losing some of their strength. There’s an understandable feeling of loss associated with that, and Sullivan sees a similar sense of loss threatening the gaming culture if the industry succumbs to pressure to change what kind of games they are creating. Yet, while that sense of loss may be real in both cases, I don’t think the gay community would want to go back. Can’t say the same thing for the gamers.
Here’s some more Warren Zevon:
What’s on your mind?
If the GOP take over all of Congress and start enforcing all of their negative social policies. It will be interesting how long all of those that were denied the right to vote, combined with all of those that start losing ways of life will react.
This election could be the last straw that awakens the sleeping giant called the Average citizen and puts them into rebellious actions.
As for myself I did night serve in the military to see this country brought down by those that practice policies that tear it down. Neither did my brother nor my father both deceased. The GOP is blatantly spitting upon our service to protect and strengthen this country. I am far from the only veteran that feels this way. We all are watching and waiting.
Sanity masks are more difficult to keep on as one ages.
Ted Cruz and Gohmert in another twenty years isn’t going to be pretty.
The problem (whatever it is) with George Will is of very long standing. It might interest you to know that he drives the way he talks.
John Kasich is not an ideologue of any kind, but an old-fashioned crony corruptocrat. He has hollowed out the entire State government and refilled it with his friends. It would be an implausible coincidence if none of the said friends had any skills whatever, but certainly no effort was made to match persons with positions. Recall that Warren Harding was also from Ohio.
There is a George Booth cartoon, depicting a yard sale with a hand-lettered sign saying “Odds and Ends”. A customer is examining what looks like a tie rod from a Nash Metropolitan that had been dispersed by a land mine. Caption: “That, Honey, is probably an end.”
FiveThirtyEight’s Senate Forecast
I love this format for the data.
I notice that after diverging in Republican favor for the last month or so, the overall numbers are beginning to converge again as they usually do as the election approaches and people make serious decisions.
With ten days to go, there are fairly straightforward targets of how many more people you need to canvass and get out to vote to get a win.
I’m a little bit PO’d that the Alabama Democrats didn’t put up a candidate against Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.
I’m always po’d when Democrats don’t at least put up a candidate. There is at least on congressional race in IL with no opposition. After all, lightning might strike.
I’m going to save this. He’s assigned a high probability of GOP wins in Iowa, Alaska, Colo, and Louisiana. It would make me happy to see him eat a bunch of crow when the votes are counted.
Nate isn’t infallible. He hired that climate-denier meathead when everyone warned him not to. Then the guy finally packed it in anyway.
Yes, I know, but those get brushed aside by his fans and those that pay him money to crunch of bunch of numbers to come up with nothing more than an astute reader of polls can do. And do better if she/he looks at the dynamics of the handful of races that aren’t foregone conclusions.
Look at the range and the mean. The probability is the area under the bell curve to the 50%-50% point. We can’t see the skew or kurtosis of the bell curve because he doesn’t plot the whole graph, but it is possible to have 90% of the area under the curve and the mean-variance footprint look like his diagram.
The other point is that if the convergence in the opinion lines is occurring, by next Friday his prediction could look a whole lot different depending on the intervening polls.
Nate Silver gets in trouble when he applies poli sci special sauce instead of his forte — hard statistical special sauce.
I think that Iowa might be a dead heat because no one knows the real Jodi Ernst, who has snubbed every major newspaper in the state. Her campaign staff does not want her to speak unscripted. Apparently Michele Bachmann would come off favorably in a comparison.
Wasn’t talking about the overview, but his list of the individual Senate races. I’m not particularly interested in his consolidation of those races and statistical calculations to project probabilities of the various possible outcomes of seats that could be held by Democrats and Republicans. The data set is at most eleven. Nine if NC and NH are excluded because unlike Nate, I don’t think either is still in play. That’s down in the range of using statistics to project the winner in the World Series, but with a lot more data hard data points.
Of those nine and at various levels of probabilities, Nate has Democrats losing six, Republicans losing two and one Republican holding. Add Montana in as another DEM loss for a total of seven with one iffy DEM pick-up in GA and another iffy Ind pick-up. Nate comes up with the most likely outcome being that the GOP picks up seven seats. (Am assuming that he leaves King in the DEM caucus.) IOW, he has the GOP running the table; just like Democrats did in 2006.
A few problems with that analogy. The general public isn’t as deeply dissatisfied with Obama and the Senate Democratic majority as they were in 2006 with Bush and McConnell’s Senate. Not one of the open DEM seats or Democrats running for reelection were vulnerable. Democrats this year are knocking on three GOP seats (GA, KS, KY — not that I expect McConnell to lose, but Grimes is knocking.) Voters replaced six weak to very lame Republicans with credible Democratic candidates that year. (Should amend that statement because IMHO Chaffee was a decent Senator, better than most Democrats, but he lost because he was a Republican.) Not one of the current Democrats that Nate expects to lose are poor Senators and none of their challengers are obviously better. Casey v. Santorum isn’t like Gardner v. Udall. Or Sullivan v. Begich.
What has made this year challenging for Democrats is that there were three D reelections in “red” states and four D retirements. Three in states that could easily flip. The DSCC screwed up by only mounting one significant challenge to a GOP seat (KY) and were too complacent about the three open seats. As if losing three would be okay. No safety margin in that strategy because most elections have a few unexpected or not too difficult to project wild cards. (Doubt the GOP expected GA and KS to be in play.) All that said and despite some of the dire looking polls, I’m beginning question if the GOP will even have a net gain.
The probabilities that Silver assigns come from a longitudinal polling model of elections running back for at least 20-25 years and uses correlation of the error between the polls on this date and the actual results of the election to add secret sauce to the probabilities. For each of the races he forecasts.
It has the problem that any model has if there are fundamental changes going on in how the state is voting. They are different problems in a poli sci sense from the problems PVI has, but statistically the failures are of a similar kind and fail at the point of the implied statistical and mathematical assumptions of opinion polling.
The idea that there not a huge amount of uncertainty in these forecasts is a delusion that soon overtakes every pollster who is earning money with forecasts.
Booman dumps on gamers yet again. Surprise.
The people who would like to back are a minority of the gaming community. Most just want to play fun or interesting games and don’t care who they’re from. Responses like that gawker guys about needing to shame and degrade nerds into submission doesn’t help.
The Guardian: MI5 spied on leading British historians for decades, secret files reveal
Since then, they just moved it over to GCHQ from MI5 and increased the number of targets by a few thousand percent.
Of possible interest to USians:
Chicago Folks and Suburban Cook County Folks?
Haven’t registered to vote and want to vote?
Want to vote to get it out of the way?
Yes, you can do EITHER ON on SUNDAY.
Take your Soul to the Polls!
For more information about where to vote:
Chicago Folks:
http://www.chicagoelections.com/en/early-voting.html
Suburban Cook County Folks:
http://www.cookcountyclerk.com/elections/earlyvoting/Pages/EarlyVotingLocations.aspx
I watched the video of V. Shaheen…have to say that he definitely said, “escort whore out the door” – It was in all likelihood a slip of the tongue, possibly the kind of thing they joked about while writing the slogan, but it was actually made worse by correcting himself and then smiling about it.
Probably not a big deal, but still a gaffe.
George might fare a little better if he would stop eating rich food before retiring for the night. Bad dreams, Georgie?
Certainly a Republican Senate will be a disaster, but I think at least some of the Nation’s fears are overstated. A ban on abortion at 20 weeks, for instance? Of course I won’t be surprised at all if they pass such a thing–hell, we might even get a fetal personhood bill–but I will be very surprised indeed if Obama signs it. Why on earth would he? If the Republican Congress starts passing abortion restrictions, they’ll be handing the Democrats a huge gift for 2016.
I’m not about to argue that Republican control of the Senate would actually be a good thing, because that would be insane, but as long as it’s a real possibility we might as well start looking for silver linings. And a fundamental problem for the Republicans is that there’s basically nothing that they want to do that is popular with anybody outside their ever-shrinking base.
Charles Krauthammer had a typically ludicrous column a couple of weeks back in which he fantasized over what the Republicans will do if they finally get an opportunity to “govern”:
But take what to the nation? Fetal personhood? The Deport ‘Em All Act of 2015? Even yet still more tax cuts for rich people and corporations? Repealing ObamaCare 12,000 more times? When your only agenda is to tear everything down, getting an opportunity to govern is not necessarily in your best political interests.