2016 ELECTION
AUG 11, 2015
The Bernie Sanders Surge Appears To Be Over
By HARRY ENTEN

Not long ago, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was surging. In just a few months, the Vermont senator halved Hillary Clinton’s lead in Iowa and moved to within shouting distance of her in New Hampshire. But it’s probably time to change the verb tense. No longer is Sanders surging. He has surged. From now on, picking up additional support will be more of a slog.

Take a look at the monthly averages of Clinton’s and Sanders’s support in live-interview polls taken in Iowa and New Hampshire since April (the month that both Clinton and Sanders officially entered the race):

Support for Sanders rocketed up in Iowa but has leveled off since June. The story is nearly the same in New Hampshire. Sanders rose from June to July in the Granite State, but his ascent slowed.1

So what’s going on? Sanders is maxing out on gains simply because of increased name recognition. Different pollsters ask about favorability and name recognition in different ways — making comparisons tricky — but the University of New Hampshire (UNH) polled Democrats in the state in April, June and July. Sanders’s favorable rating went from 45 percent in April to 66 percent in June and then to 69 percent in July. The share of respondents with a neutral opinion or no opinion of Sanders fell from 44 percent to 24 percent and then to 20 percent during that period. In other words, between April and June, Sanders was picking up low hanging fruit: The liberal wing of the Democratic Party learned about Sanders and liked him. But now, most voters who are predisposed to like Sanders already know about him....

2016 ELECTION
AUG 19, 2015
Senator Sanders, You’re No Barack Obama
Clinton was the early favorite in 2008; she’s more than that now.
By HARRY ENTEN

Is the 2016 Democratic primary a sequel of 2008? The Bernie Sanders supporters filling up my email inbox think so.

Less than 24 hours after I wrote that the Sanders surge had slowed, or even stopped, a poll came out showing Sanders with his first lead in any state (other than his home state of Vermont). That poll stirred a lot of responses (some kind and some not so kind). Here’s a fairly typical comment:



One poll is just one poll; it could be an outlier, or it could signal some shift in the race. We need more data to find out. But we have plenty of data to see a number of problems with comparing Sanders’s rise to President Obama’s toppling of Hillary Clinton in 2008....

Methodology

These interactive charts show which candidate is on target to win the Democratic nomination and which one is falling behind. They are based on our estimate of how many delegates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders would need in each primary and caucus to win a simple majority of the 4,051 pledged delegates at the Democratic National Convention.

We reached these estimates by developing benchmarks for each state based on its demographics. In particular, we used exit polls to determine the racial composition of the Democratic electorate in each state, how each state lines up on a liberal-conservative scale, and whether Democratic voters live in rural or conservative areas. Sanders does better in whiter, more liberal and more rural states. Clinton does better in states with more nonwhite voters — especially African-Americans. For more detail about these procedures, see this article.

After we arrived at baseline estimates of candidate support, we adjusted their support proportionally in each state until both candidates were tied nationally. Finally, we multiplied each candidate’s adjusted share of support by the number of pledged delegates available in each state to arrive at delegate targets (unlike Republicans, Democrats award all of their pledged delegates proportionally). Because there is limited data available to model the 99 pledged delegates from six delegations — American Samoa, Democrats Abroad, Guam, Northern Marianas, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands — we set both Clinton’s and Sanders’s targets in those contests at half of the delegates available.

2016 ELECTION 1:55 PM FEB 25, 2016

Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Need Momentum — He Needs To Win These States
By NATE SILVER

The media narrative of the Democratic presidential race is that Bernie Sanders has lost momentum to Hillary Clinton. After nearly beating Clinton in Iowa and then crushing her in New Hampshire, Sanders had a setback on Saturday, the story goes, losing Nevada to Clinton by 5 percentage points. And this weekend, Sanders is about to lose South Carolina and lose it badly.

All of this is true insofar as it goes. But it doesn’t do nearly enough to account for the demographic differences between the states. Considering the state’s demographics, Sanders’s 5-point loss in Nevada was probably more impressive than his photo-finish in Iowa. It was possibly even a more impressive result than his 22-point romp in New Hampshire. Meanwhile, a big loss in South Carolina would be relatively easy to forgive.

That doesn’t mean Sanders is in great shape, however. Based on the polling so far, Sanders is coming up short of where he needs to be in most Super Tuesday (March 1) states, along with major industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania where he’ll need to run neck and neck with Clinton later on.

These conclusions come from a set of state-by-state targets we’ve calculated for Sanders and Clinton, which are based on some simple demographic factors in each state. As has been clear for a long while, Sanders performs better in whiter and more liberal states. But the abundance of new polling from Super Tuesday states, along with the Nevada result, gives us the data to establish more accurate benchmarks than the ones we set before. (See last week’s article “Bernie Sanders’s Path To The Nomination” for our previous estimates.) In particular, although Sanders might not have won the Hispanic vote in Nevada, he’s clearly made up ground among Hispanic voters. African-Americans, in contrast, remain overwhelmingly in Clinton’s camp. There may also be an urban/rural divide in the Democratic vote, with Sanders performing better in more rural areas....

"Senator Bernie Sanders' wife, Jane, said Russell Simmons called Bernie Sanders to talk about an endorsement in an interview with CNN's Jim Sciutto."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=1415708

Top Arkansas Lawyer Helped Hillary Clinton Turn Big Profit
Published: March 18, 1994
WASHINGTON, March 17— Starting just before Bill Clinton was elected Governor of Arkansas, Hillary Rodham Clinton made about $100,000 in one year in the commodities market with the help and advice of a friend who was the top lawyer for one of the state's most powerful and heavily regulated companies.

The investments, made in a commodities trading account that was opened three weeks before Mr. Clinton was elected Governor in 1978, substantially altered the finances of the Clintons. At the time, Mr. Clinton was Attorney General. He and his wife were rising stars in Little Rock whose salaries were modest by the standards of their peers.

The proceeds helped them to buy a home, to invest in securities and real estate and eventually to provide a nest egg for their young daughter, according to the couple's associates and a review of the family's financial records. Tyson's Fortunes

But the trades, which came to light during a two-month examination of the Clintons' finances by The New York Times, also left them in the position of having relied significantly on the help of one of the state's premier powerbrokers, James B. Blair, a Clinton confidant who at the time was the primary outside lawyer for Tyson Foods Inc., of Springdale, Ark., the nation's biggest poultry company.

During Mr. Clinton's tenure in Arkansas, Tyson benefited from a variety of state actions, including $9 million in government loans, the placement of company executives on important state boards and favorable decisions on environmental issues...

Brian | February 21, 2016 at 3:10 pm |
Here is what I think is the most important issue. In 2008, Clinton dominated the Democratic National Committee using the same machine politics she is using today. So to win, Obama built a new, separate organization, and didn’t allocate much of those funds to congressional races. Because of this, the DNC did not have money to pour into critical races nor get out the vote and Republicans won 69 seats. Today, the DNC has 63% of the permanent staff it had in 2007. (115/183)

The Clinton vs. Sanders race is doing the same thing. Clinton is again using machine politics to control the DNC, and Sanders supporters have run campaigns to kill donations to the DNC to force changes and make the system fair.

Someone needs to hit the democratic presidential candidates with this problem as a debate question. Ask them what they are going to do about it, and ask why anybody should vote for either of them if they are just going to continue to rip apart funding for the congressional offices that matter more.

Hilary – When are you going to stop wrecking the DNC and killing democrats in Congress by treating DNC as your personal fiefdom?

Sanders – How are you going to ensure that congressional seats are funded if you get elected?

And separately, for Barack Obama: You became the first black president, great. But by spitting off a huge donor pool and hoarding it, you destroyed your chances of working with congress completely, put Republicans in charge, and made climate change denial the norm in Congress. So what are you going to do about that from this point forward? How will you rectify that?

Krugman and the Gang of 4 Need to Apologize for Smearing Gerald Friedman
Posted on February 21, 2016 by William Black
February 21, 2016 Bloomington, MN

If you depend for your news on the New York Times you have been subjected to a drumbeat of article attacking Bernie Sanders – and the conclusion of everyone “serious” that his economics are daft. In particular, you would “know” that four prior Chairs of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) (the Gang of 4) have signed an open letter to Bernie that delivered a death blow to his proposals. Further, you would know that anyone who dared to disagree with these four illustrious economists was so deranged that he or she was acting like a Republican in denial of global climate change. The open letter set its sights on a far less famous economist, Gerald Friedman, of U. Mass at Amherst. It unleashed a personalized dismissal of his competence and integrity. Four of the Nation’s top economists against one non-famous economists – at a school that studies heterodox economics. That sounds like a fight that the referee should stop in the first round before Friedman is pummeled to death. But why did Paul Krugman need to “tag in” to try to save the Gang of 4 from being routed?

Krugman proclaimed that the Gang of 4 had crushed Friedman in a TKO. Tellingly, Krugman claimed that anyone who disagreed with the Gang of 4 must be beyond the pale (like Friedman and Bernie). Indeed, Krugman was so eager to fend off any analysis of the Group of 4’s attacks that he competed with himself rhetorically as to what inner circle of Hell any supporter of Friedman should be consigned. In the 10:44 a.m. variant, Krugman dismissed Bernie as “not ready for prime time” and decreed that it was illegitimate to critique the Gang of 4’s critique.

In Sanders’s case, I don’t think it’s ideology as much as being not ready for prime time — and also of not being willing to face up to the reality that the kind of drastic changes he’s proposing, no matter how desirable, would produce a lot of losers as well as winners.

And if your response to these concerns is that they’re all corrupt, all looking for jobs with Hillary, you are very much part of the problem.

The implicit message is that four famous economists had to be correct, therefore anyone who disagreed with them must be a conspiracy theorist who is “very much part of the problem.” Paul doesn’t explain what “the problem” is, but he sure makes it sound awful. Logically, “the problem” has to be progressives supporting Bernie.

Two hours later, Paul decided that his poisoned pen had not been toxic enough, he now denounced Sanders as a traitor to the progressives who was on his way “to making Donald Trump president.” To point out the problems in the Gang of 4’s attack on Friedman was to treat them “as right-wing enemies.” Why was Krugman so fervid in its efforts to smear Friedman and prevent any critique of the Gang of 4’s smear that he revised his article within two hours and amped up his rhetoric to a shrill cry of pain? Well, the second piece admits that Gang of 4’s smear of Friedman “didn’t get into specifics” and that progressives were already rising in disgust at Paul’s arrogance and eagerness to sign onto a smear that claimed “rigor” but actually “didn’t get into specifics” while denouncing a scholar. Paul, falsely, portrayed Friedman as a Bernie supporter. Like Krugman, Friedman is actually a Hillary supporter.

Sanders needs to disassociate himself from this kind of fantasy economics right now. If his campaign responds instead by lashing out — well, a campaign that treats Alan Krueger, Christy Romer, and Laura Tyson as right-wing enemies is well on its way to making Donald Trump president.

If we combine both of Paul’s screeds we see that the only way to disagree with a prominent economist is to demonize them as either “corrupt” or “enemies.” ...

Jamie Galbraith’s Letter to Former CEA Chairs
February 18, 2016

I was highly interested to see your letter of yesterday’s date to Senator Sanders and Professor Gerald Friedman. I respond here as a former Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee – the congressional counterpart to the CEA.

You write that you have applied rigor to your analyses of economic proposals by Democrats and Republicans. On reading this sentence I looked to the bottom of the page, to find a reference or link to your rigorous review of Professor Friedman’s study. I found nothing there.

You go on to state that Professor Friedman makes “extreme claims” that “cannot be supported by the economic evidence.” You object to the projection of “huge beneficial impacts on growth rates, income and employment that exceed even the most grandiose predictions by Republicans about the impact of their tax cut proposals.”

Matthew Yglesias makes an important point about your letter:

“It’s noteworthy that the former CEA chairs criticizing Friedman didn’t bother to run through a detailed explanation of their problems with the paper. To them, the 5.3 percent figure was simply absurd on its face, and it was good enough for them to say so, relying on their authority to generate media coverage.”

So, let’s first ask whether an economic growth rate, as projected, of 5.3 percent per year is, as you claim, “grandiose.” There are not many ambitious experiments in economic policy with which to compare it, so let’s go back to the Reagan years. What was the actual average real growth rate in 1983, 1984, and 1985, following the enactment of the Reagan tax cuts in 1981? Just under 5.4 percent. That’s a point of history, like it or not.

You write that “no credible economic research supports economic impacts of these magnitudes.” But how did Professor Friedman make his estimates? The answer is in his paper. What Professor Friedman did, was to use the standard impact assumptions and forecasting methods of the mainstream economists and institutions. For example, Professor Friedman starts with a fiscal multiplier of 1.25, and shades it down to the range of 0.8 by the mid 2020s. Is this “not credible”? If that’s your claim, it’s an indictment of the methods of (for instance) the CBO, the OMB, and the CEA.

To be sure, skepticism about standard forecasting methods is perfectly reasonable. I’m a skeptic myself. My 2014 book The End of Normal is all about problems with mainstream forecasting.

In the specific case of this paper, one can quibble with the out-year multipliers, or with the productivity assumptions, or with the presumed impact of a higher minimum wage. One can invoke the trade deficit or the exchange rate. Professor Friedman makes all of these points himself. But those issues are well within mainstream norms.

There is no “magic asterisk,” no strange theory involved here. And the main effect of adjusting the assumptions, which would a perfectly reasonable thing to do, would be to curtail the growth rate after a few years – not at the beginning, when it would matter most.

It is not fair or honest to claim that Professor Friedman’s methods are extreme. On the contrary, with respect to forecasting method, they are largely mainstream. Nor is it fair or honest to imply that you have given Professor Friedman’s paper a rigorous review. You have not.

What you have done, is to light a fire under Paul Krugman, who is now using his high perch to airily dismiss the Friedman paper as “nonsense.” Paul is an immensely powerful figure, and many people rely on him for careful assessments. It seems clear that he has made no such assessment in this case.

Instead, Paul relies on you to impugn an economist with far less reach, whose work is far more careful, in point of fact, than your casual dismissal of it. He and you also imply that Professor Friedman did his work for an unprofessional motive. But let me point out, in case you missed it, that Professor Friedman is a political supporter of Secretary Clinton. His motives are, on the face of it, not political.

For the record, in case you’re curious, I’m not tied to Professor Friedman in any way. But the powerful – such as Paul and yourselves – should be careful where you step.

Let’s turn, finally, to the serious question. What does the Friedman paper really show? The answer is quite simple, and the exercise is – while not perfect – almost entirely ordinary.

What the Friedman paper shows, is that under conventional assumptions, the projected impact of Senator Sanders’ proposals stems from their scale and ambition. When you dare to do big things, big results should be expected. The Sanders program is big, and when you run it through a standard model, you get a big result.

That, by the way, is the lesson of the Reagan era – like it or not. It is a lesson that, among today’s political leaders, only Senator Sanders has learned.

Yours,

(Jamie)

James K. Galbraith
Executive Director, Joint Economic Committee, 1981-2

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index 2015
Democracy in an age of anxiety

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index provides a snapshot of the state of democracy worldwide for 165 independent states and two territories—this covers almost the entire population of the world and the vast majority of the world’s states (micro-states are excluded). The Democracy Index is based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture. Based on their scores on a range of indicators within these categories, each country is then itself categorised as one of four types of regime: “full democracies”; “flawed democracies”; “hybrid regimes”; and “authoritarian regimes”.

This is the eighth edition of the Democracy Index. It reflects the situation in 2015, a year in which democracy was tested in the face of war, terrorism, mass migration and other crises, and, in some cases, suffered serious setbacks. The title of this year’s report reflects the threat to democracy emanating from the fearful mood of our times, which informs the reactions of ordinary people and political elites alike. An increased sense of personal and societal anxiety and insecurity in the face of diverse perceived risks and threats—economic, political, social and security—is undermining democracy, which depends on a steadfast commitment to upholding enlightenment values (liberty, equality, fraternity, reason, tolerance and free expression) and fostering democratic institutions and a democratic political culture.

In many democracies, political elites worry about their inability to relate to the electorate and fear the challenge that populist parties pose. In some cases, established parties have colluded to exclude or marginalise the populists. In the face of terrorist threats, democratic governments have reacted in anti-democratic ways, calling into question freedom of speech or adopting draconian laws. In non-democratic countries, authoritarian political elites fear the threat from the masses and seek to bolster their rule by imprisoning opponents, restricting the media, limiting popular freedoms and repressing protest. Meanwhile, electorates are ever more anxious—about economic insecurity, about their personal safety, about the consequences of immigration, about the threat of terrorism—and angry that their concerns are not being represented by the established parties. This mood of fear and insecurity represents one of the main threats to democracy today.

Almost one-half of the world’s countries can be considered to be democracies, but, in our index, the number of “full democracies” is low, at only 20 countries; 59 countries are rated as "flawed democracies”. Of the remaining 88 countries in our index, 51 are “authoritarian” and 37 are considered to be “hybrid regimes”. As could be expected, the developed OECD countries dominate among “full democracies”; there are two Asian countries, one Latin American country (Uruguay) and one African country (Mauritius), which suggests that level of development is not a binding constraint, but is a constraint, nevertheless. Slightly less than one-half (48.4%) of the world’s population lives in a democracy of some sort, although only 8.9% reside in “full democracies”. Around 2.6bn people, more than one-third of the world’s population, still live under authoritarian rule (with a large share being, of course, in China).

“Flawed democracies” are concentrated in Latin America, eastern Europe and Asia...

Eugene Robinson: MLK’s prophetic call for economic justice
By Eugene Robinson Opinion writer January 15, 2015

...As we celebrate King’s great achievement and sacrifice, it is wrong to round off the sharp edges of his legacy. He saw inequality as a fundamental and tragic flaw in this society, and he made clear in the weeks leading up to his assassination that economic issues were becoming the central focus of his advocacy.

Nearly five decades later, King’s words on the subject still ring true. On March 10, 1968, just weeks before his death, he spoke to a union group in New York about what he called “the other America.” He was preparing to launch a Poor People’s Campaign whose premise was that issues of jobs and issues of justice were inextricably intertwined.

“One America is flowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of equality,” King said. “That America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies, culture and education for their minds, freedom and human dignity for their spirits. .?.?. But as we assemble here tonight, I’m sure that each of us is painfully aware of the fact that there is another America, and that other America has a daily ugliness about it that transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair.”

Those who lived in the other America, King said, were plagued by “inadequate, substandard and often dilapidated housing conditions,” by “substandard, inferior, quality-less schools,” by having to choose between unemployment and low-wage jobs that didn’t even pay enough to put food on the table.

The problem was structural, King said: “This country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.”...

Is it safe to live near nuclear power?
By Alex Pavlak, Ph.D., P.E., Harry Winsor, Ph.D., John Rudesill and Norman Meadow, Ph.D.

Nuclear power development has stagnated since Three Mile Island mainly as a result of the public’s fear of radiation. This fear has real roots: ignorance of the dangers of radiation during the early years; radioactive fallout from atmospheric testing; lack of trust resulting from Cold War secrecy; and the long latency period before consequences can be diagnosed. But are these fears rational today? Is it safe to live near a waste repository, mine, or ore processing, nuclear power or fuel reprocessing plant? Only trusted epidemiological data can provide answers.

The Lifespan Study of Hiroshima & Nagasaki survivors concluded that the primary detectible long-term consequence of high radiation exposure was cancer, not genetic mutations. In 1991, Jablon et al. found “no excess cancer deaths” in U.S. counties with nuclear facilities. More recently the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) funded the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to design an improved study to quantify cancer incidence (not mortality) near nuclear facilities. This distinction is important because incidence is much more accurate than mortality.

NRC completed Pilot Planning, and then as reported by The Hill, the NRC canceled Pilot Execution. The stated reasons were “too expensive”, and “too long to get answers.” The Pilot Execution phase’s estimated cost was $8-9 million for 7 facilities. Studying all 62+ U.S. facilities would have a larger cost, but lower unit cost, because a template will have been validated. Today’s opponents of nuclear power should strongly support the study to provide solid evidence that nuclear plants are dangerous and operators cover up accidental releases. Proponents of nuclear power should support it to provide convincing specific data that nuclear facilities can be operated safely. People living anywhere near nuclear facilities should support it because it addresses fears that have been too often ignored.

The NAS has a good reputation for unbiased, independent scientific study. The Research Committee is in place. NAS policy is that once the study is funded the sponsor cannot influence it. Internationally, such studies are fragmented and many are suspect; there are no comparable large scale studies.

<snip>

...The world needs a template for how to efficiently conduct such studies and keep them up to date. It is time for Congress, to step up and get this process started.