June 18, 2016

Reminder: Exit-Poll Conspiracy Theories Are Totally Baseless (The Nation)

http://www.thenation.com/article/reminder-exit-poll-conspiracy-theories-are-totally-baseless/

The exit poll conspiracies are now competing with the email conspiracies as the stupidest meme of this campaign season. To summarize this excellent article (from the oligarchic corporatist Nation).

1 What the conspiracy idiots are talking about, always, are discrepancies between the election results and the very first round of exit poll results, which as everyone except for conspiracy idiots knows, are highly unreliable preliminary numbers. The final exit poll results actually matched the election results pretty well this season, which is why conspiracy idiots don't talk about them.

2 The conspiracy idiots say that the reason the final exit poll numbers match well but the preliminary ones don't is because the exit poll company "adjusted" the numbers to cover up the fraud. Meaning that exit pollsters were in on the conspiracy (hey, why not, the more the merrier, right?). Which is insane, but it's also based on a lie. The original numbers aren't "unadjusted" either. All the numbers are adjusted based on demographics, just that there's more data with the final, more accurate exit poll results, and once live results start coming they can adjust to actual turnout numbers versus expected turnout numbers.

3 The conspiracy idiots say that in other countries they use exit polls to determine voter fraud, so this is evidence of fraud here. The first part is true, but (of course) people doing fraud detection don't use the inaccurate preliminary numbers (because they aren't idiots like the conspiracy theorists).

And also, even the final exit poll numbers in the primary elections aren't up to the same standards as fraud-monitoring exit polls, the methodology is too inaccurate. How do we know this? Because the guy who ran the primary exit polls also does fraud-detection exit polling in other countries, and in interviews has said very clearly that the exit poll methodology used for primaries is not up to the accuracy standards that would be required for fraud detection.

June 18, 2016

Odds the idiots with the fake "Stanford study" conspiracy know their ass from a hole in the ground?

I'd say about 27 trillion to one.

June 17, 2016

Here's what the prediction odds are for VP

Tim Kaine 25
Elizabeth Warren 22
Julian Castro 12
Sherrod Brown 9
Tom Perez 8
Cory Booker 7
Bernie Sanders 4
Al Franken 3
Martin OMalley 3
Deval Patrick 1

http://predictwise.com/blog/2016-president-democratic-vice-president-nomination

I think Sherrod Brown should be higher

June 17, 2016

Step one: angry speeches. Step three: single payer. Step two?????

What's the plan here, Bernie? How is refusing to concede an election you lost by double digits going to get us to single payer?

June 17, 2016

Release the measurements!

June 17, 2016

Can you even imagine if Bernie had won by double digits, and then Hillary said

she wouldn't concede and endorse him if he didn't adopt her policies and let her change the DNC rules? Well, no, you can't, because Hillary would never do anything so selfishly ego-driven and irresponsible. But if she did, can you imagine how Bernie's campaign and his supporters would react? You think Bernie would say, OK, Hillary, sounds good, we'll take out free college and drop to $12, after all, you did get almost 45% of the votes, so you get to drive the agenda. No.

He's so full of himself. He really believes that he is the one true righteous person, so that even after the voters resoundingly rejected him in favor of Hillary, somehow he still gets to call the shots. He's not a "democratic" socialist at all, because "democracy" means heeding the will of the voters, who just got done telling him over and over that they don't want him.

June 16, 2016

Can Bernie just keep campaigning forever? Would be a kinda sweet deal.

Just keep his website up with the "donate" button, send out emails about "oligarchs" to get people to give him money, and go around giving angry speeches. And occasionally charter a jet for exotic international vacations.

Just tell the FEC that he's running for president in 2020.

June 16, 2016

 Reminder: Exit-Poll Conspiracy Theories Are Totally Baseless

I didn’t have to read Bob Fitrakis’s wonderfully titled piece, “Joshua Holland, The Nation’s Truth Nazi, Needs to Calm Down.” I’ve become familiar with the genre since writing that there’s no reason to suspect that election fraud has been a factor in the Democratic primary results. Similar pieces have been published by Counterpunch, The Huffington Post (by Tim Robbins!) and a slew of other fringier outlets. They all stick to the same formula: After questioning my intellectual capacity, they claim or imply that I dismiss the real problems with our piss-poor election systems, and follow that with a heaping serving of nonsense about how exit polls supposedly reveal widespread fraud committed by the Clinton campaign.

I suppose it’s better to be a Truth Nazi than the regular kind. And since we’ll likely see a new round of this stuff following today’s primaries, let me respond to all of these pieces by acknowledging that we have an election infrastructure that would embarrass most banana republics. But when it comes to exit polling, essentially everything these articles claim is dead wrong.

The laziest iteration of these claims is that the exit polls have diverged significantly from the final vote tallies in many of the states Clinton won, and the same pattern isn’t evident in Republican contests. That’s simply untrue. The exit polls have been off in a couple of states, but for the most part they’ve fallen within the margin of error in both Republican and Democratic contests.

But the conspiracy-mongers aren’t really talking about exit polls. Their claims are based on obsessively parsing preliminary exit poll data that some media outlets publish when the polls close—the same data that political reporters always tell people to take with a big grain of salt because they’re notoriously inaccurate. (Most of their claims are based on the work of Richard Charnin, who runs a blog devoted to “JFK conspiracy and systemic election fraud analysis.” Charnin’s also a mathematician, as Tim Robbins notes, but, as we’ll see, his calculations aren’t the problem.)

http://www.thenation.com/article/reminder-exit-poll-conspiracy-theories-are-totally-baseless/

Great article, thoroughly explains why the conspiracy theories we keep seeing are just plain dumb.

June 15, 2016

If it's not ego, then what is Bernie doing?

Let's deal in facts. He's not going to be the nominee. He's not going to get his single payer. Holding out his endorsement is going to accomplish absolutely nothing in terms of policy changes of the US government. Nothing. Period. He has no actual power to change policy in the progressive direction. The only power he has is to help Trump become president. That's it.

He can make some of his angry supporters happy by giving the finger to the Democratic Party. But that doesn't actually make life better for the 99% or accomplish anything in terms of policy change besides making Trump more likely to be president. Is that what he wants? Does he want to give a big FU to the Democrats, and is willing to risk Trump in order to do so?

Someone explain please. What is he thinking?

June 15, 2016

Is it really a good idea to get rid of closed primaries?

During the primary season, predictably, both sides will tend to favor the format that helps their candidate. This is just human nature. But now that it's over, we can maybe have a rational discussion about which type is better.

This time around, the open primaries were better for Bernie, because he did better with independents. But it's very far from guaranteed that open will always favor the more liberal candidate. Say hypothetically a Mike Bloomberg decides to run as a Dem against an Elizabeth Warren. I'm pretty sure in that case that Bloomberg would be the beneficiary of open primaries. Is that what we want?

As far as principles, I can see the argument either way. On one hand, it makes sense that Democrats get to choose the Democratic nominee. And it's not like it's hard to register as a Democrat. On the other, open primaries bring more people into the process, and could potentially broaden the party.

But careful what you wish for with that party broadening. One of the most hated entities here is "Third Way", but like it or not, "Third Way" was a broadening of the party. Just not in the direction that liberals wanted it. But most non-Democrats are less liberal, not more liberal than Democrats. Yes, there are Green party people and other disaffected liberal independents that are to the left of the average Dem, and this time those people turned out for Bernie. But there are also libertarians, and "pro-business social liberals" and all sorts of other independents to the right of the average Dem that might turn out in future open primaries.