Politics thread

Trump's VP announcement tomorrow at 11am

then we head into what could be a very interesting convention

thank god i'm leaving the country during it

welcome

Theresa May picked Boris Johnson as foreign secretary

All the possible VPs are on Trump's convention speaking list other than Pence.

A normal campaign might do that as a head fake to build suspense or something. An incompetent campaign would accidentally leak their VP choice like that.

Yesterday Carla Hayden was confirmed 74-18 by the Senate. she is set to become the first ever professional librarian to head the Library of Congress. yay

The previous head held the position for 28 years so this can be very consequential for the organization.

jerseyhoya wrote:Your math is bad and you should feel bad

It's not my math, it was my hasty, basic thought process. Just because 8 of the 57 electoral results showed an incumbent losing does not mean that 49 of the 57 times the incumbent won (which would be 86%). Math right, logic wrong.

If you're going to insult me, at least do it properly.

HEY SLUGS. You swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. As they say in Texas. I’ll bet you couldn’t pour !@#$ out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won’t go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you.
You’re a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.
You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.
I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformation. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?

Thanks Buck, that's all I ever wanted.

pacino wrote:Yesterday Carla Hayden was confirmed 74-18 by the Senate. she is set to become the first ever professional librarian to head the Library of Congress. yay

The previous head held the position for 28 years so this can be very consequential for the organization.

yeah, the last guy was a politeering dope who mostly spent money on vacations and degraded the cataloging corps. happy to have someone who understands the issues in there

Houshphandzadeh wrote:

pacino wrote:Yesterday Carla Hayden was confirmed 74-18 by the Senate. she is set to become the first ever professional librarian to head the Library of Congress. yay

The previous head held the position for 28 years so this can be very consequential for the organization.

yeah, the last guy was a politeering dope who mostly spent money on vacations and degraded the cataloging corps. happy to have someone who understands the issues in there

i read an article bashing him but didn't post it because i don't know enough about it. basically they said he didn't care about technology or outreach or availability of copyrighted materials.

the "unconventional convention"? that's what you've got?

No "mistake by the lake", no "unconscience clods", no "they have Kings in Cleveland, but no presidents at all", no "Ohio, birthplace of Presidents, and abortion clinic of real estate scammers" in there? Why are we even doing any of this? Does no one ever learn anything, ever?

/shakes fist at cloud

I am sorry but this nearly made me spit iced tea:

"Believe me, he's putting a lot of thought into this. He's got some awesome, awesome people," Eric Trump told Fox News on Wednesday night.


Clearly the nuts didn't fall far from that particular tree.

drsmooth wrote:the "unconventional convention"? that's what you've got?

No "mistake by the lake", no "unconscience clods", no "they have Kings in Cleveland, but no presidents at all", no "Ohio, birthplace of Presidents, and abortion clinic of real estate scammers" in there? Why are we even doing any of this? Does no one ever learn anything, ever?

/shakes fist at cloud

coulda cribbed off the NYDN...

traderdave wrote:I am sorry but this nearly made me spit iced tea:

"Believe me, he's putting a lot of thought into this. He's got some awesome, awesome people," Eric Trump told Fox News on Wednesday night.


Clearly the nuts didn't fall far from that particular tree.

I actually stumbled upon that interview last night during Espy commercials. I don't think I'd ever heard Eric Trump speak before--dear god, he is awful. He's basically The Donald's mini-me.

I also saw Newt and Hannity chuckling it up about his Veep candidacy.

So yeah, I didn't think it was possible for me to hate Sean Hannity's show any more than I already did, but last night proved me wrong.

interesting analysis of deaths in prisons. 810 since this time last year. It also discusses Sandra Bland's suicide and the lack of care given to her. Lots of low-tech advice in this piece about what jails can do to identify risk factors and prevent suicide. also of note:

In its last annual report on jail deaths the Justice Department found that 40 percent of the inmates who died in 2013, or 387 people, had been behind bars for a week or less. One-quarter of the suicides in our data occurred within the first three days. (This number should be considered low, since we have not yet obtained a cause of death for 237 cases.)

There are several distinct groups of people who can be at risk when they arrive in jail. There are those charged with violent crimes and sex offenses, who may fear long prison sentences or being targeted behind bars. Another group occupies the opposite end of the spectrum entirely—people who have been arrested for very minor offenses. We identified dozens of suicides of jail inmates who were arrested on low-level offenses such as public intoxication, drug possession, trespassing, traffic charges, DUI and theft.
Then there are those who have become enmeshed in a cycle of short jail stints because they can’t pay fines for minor violations or afford to post bond. (This is a particular hazard for minorities; research has found that black Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 receive significantly higher bail than other racial groups, for example.) Bland herself had some knowledge of this cycle. While unemployed, she had racked up thousands of dollars in fines and fees in connection with traffic charges. Her lawyer believed he could get a 2010 marijuana charge dropped, according to The Nation, but Bland couldn't afford to pay him, so she spent nearly a month in a Houston jail.

Jails with fewer than 50 inmates have a suicide rate five times higher than larger jails, according to a 2002 Justice Department study. Jonathan Smith, the former chief of the DOJ’s Special Litigation Section, said small police-run jails simply aren’t equipped to confine human beings. “In order to insure that [inmates] get adequate medical care and nutrition and are protected from violence and what have you, you can’t have a 10-person jail and do that in a meaningful way,” Smith said.

What might reduce suicide is not treating prisoners like animals and giving them their rights. Prison is cruel and unusual for like 95% of the prison population.

Not excusing their treatment in prison but what would help even more is the prisoners not committing crimes in the first place.

That's constructive.

I want to bring this one forward from the last thread.

The Crimson Cyclone wrote:

The Crimson Cyclone wrote:

pacino wrote:

The Nightman Cometh wrote:Hillary is struggling with quite possibly the most unpopular politician in American history. I'm not sure how you can say she would most likely win against another candidate in 2020.

because she would've already won. incumbent politicians tend to win.

the only reason GHWB lost was because a third party idiot was involved. The Democrats got very lucky that election.

fallacy

Perot voters evenly split the vote between Clinton and Bush

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/ross-perot-m ... -candidacy

Let’s start with the basics. Clinton was elected with 43% of the vote, to Bush’s 37.5%, a difference of nearly six million votes. To overtake Clinton in a two-way race, then, Bush would have needed to gain the lion’s share of the Perot vote, about two-thirds of it. But in the exit poll conducted on Election Day, just 38% of Perot’s backers said Bush was their second choice. Thirty-eight percent also said Clinton was. “The impact of Mr. Perot’s supporters on the campaign’s outcome,” wrote The New York Times, “appears to have been minimal.” The Washington Post’s conclusion: “Ross Perot’s presence on the 1992 presidential ballot did not change the outcome of the election.”

That Steve Kornacki piece cites nationwide data, which is totally irrelevant in our Electoral College system. I have trouble relying on the quality of exit polling data from 1992. For example, he reports that it was split 38%/38% as to whether Clinton or Bush was the second choice of Perot voters--um, who was the second choice of the other 24%? Andre Marrou (Libertarian candidate)? Were they not going to vote? Did the exit poll account for that--maybe, but Kornacki doesn't even discuss it.

But my biggest issue with his thesis is the assumption that the national exit polling rate means that Perot would've split equally in a particular state. Look at the list of states that Clinton won by a close margin (<5%):

States (Margin) (EV)
Georgia (0.59%) (13)
New Hampshire (1.22) (4)
Ohio (1.83) (21)
New Jersey (2.37) (15)
Montana (2.51) (3)
Nevada (2.63) (4)
Kentucky (3.21) (8)
Colorado (4.26) (8)
Wisconsin (4.35) (11)
Lousiana (4.61) (9)
Tennessee (4.65) (11)

That is 107 EV in an election where the winner ended up with 370. Those <5% states were Clinton's margin of victory, period. Would all of them have flipped to Bush had Perot never entered? Probably not, but we'll never know because I doubt there is enough valid data out there to reasonably estimate what 544,479 Wisconsin voters (margin: 110,211) or 1,036,426 Ohio voters (margin: 90,632) would have done without Perot.

There was also an additional 75 EV if you expand that sample to a margin of less than 10%. Now, 10% would normally be a huge margin, but when Perot is carrying >20% of the vote in many states, 10% is nothing. Could Bush have flipped Iowa (6.01%, 7 EV) if Perot didn't scoop up 253,468 votes when the margin was 81,462--he would've need to capture Perot voters at a 2:1 ratio. Probably not, but who knows.

By contrast, Bush only won six states by less than 5%, and one of those was Texas, which you'll never convince me would flip to Clinton without Perot. He likely wouldn't have lost Virginia (4.37%, 13 EV) or North Carolina (0.79% 14 EV) due to those state's contemporary voting history, but you never know. Florida (1.89%, 25 EV) would be his only <5% state at risk without Perot IMO, with the others being Arizona (1.95% 8 EV) and South Dakota (3.52% 3 EV).

I don't think we'll ever really know because of the lower quality of the polling back then, but I don't think that calling it a fallacy is quite accurate either.