"Losing" With Cruz

You have to love what the GOP has come to these days.

Republican elders, desperate to stop Donald Trump, are increasingly convinced they would rather forfeit the White House than hand their party to the divisive Manhattan billionaire. That’s why the party’s establishment is suddenly rallying behind Ted Cruz, a man they’ve long despised and who has little chance, in the view of many GOP veterans, of defeating Hillary Clinton on Election Day.

They are getting exactly what they deserve:)

Guns In Schools

Looks like parents in Michigan are pretty pissed about open carry a gun in school.

"Kids with a toy gun can get kicked out of school but an adult with a (real) gun doesn't?" one man asked. "It's not appropriate," said parent Michelle Miller. 

"My family hunts. My daughter carries a concealed weapon. There's a time and a place for it (carrying guns) and school is not the time and place."

What did you guys expect would happen when you enable the Gun Cult?

The Great Establishment Hope

Why I Heart Al Franken

Sen. Franken Pushes Back Against Republicans Obstructing Supre...
In case you missed it, yesterday in the Judiciary Committee I decided to set the record straight on some of the absurd arguments that many Senate Republicans are using to shirk their constitutional duty. They are refusing to hold hearings for Chief Judge Merrick Garland—President Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court—and many are refusing to even meet with him. This is obstruction, plain and simple, and the American people deserve better.
Posted by U.S. Senator Al Franken on Friday, March 18, 2016

What The Fuck Happened To The Republican Party?

Would it make any difference that Saint Ronnie is saying it?

The Self Esteem Movement is to Blame for Trump

Good Words

Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa.

---David Brooks, The New York Times 

The Boiling Vat of Oil

Trump Voters are Losers

There have been several theories advanced about the nature of Trump voters: they're angry, they're authoritarian, they're racist, etc.

This analysis found the locations where Trump is attracting the most voters:

...Trump counties are places where white identity mixes with long-simmering economic dysfunctions.

The places where Trump has done well cut across many of the usual fault lines of American politics — North and South, liberal and conservative, rural and suburban. One element common to a significant share of his supporters is that they have largely missed the generation-long transition of the United States away from manufacturing and into a diverse, information-driven economy deeply intertwined with the rest of the world. 

“It’s a nonurban, blue-collar and now apparently quite angry population,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “They’re not people who have moved around a lot, and things have been changing away from them, but they live in areas that feel stagnant in a lot of ways.”

 In particular, Trump voters are white with no high school diploma, they live in mobile homes, they have "old economy" jobs, they have a history of voting for segregationists, they're unemployed, etc.

In other words, they're losers.

This pretty much explains everything about Trump supporters, and how he's able to con them into supporting him. As a casino owner, Trump knows a lot about losers. That's because casino gamblers are by definition losers -- the house always wins.

The trick to running a casino is to provide the illusion that you're winning even when you're losing. Slot machines are a great example. There's a lot of noise, and lights, and the thrill of anticipation that something exciting is going to happen. The machine keeps leading you on, giving you a little jolt of excitement every once in a while while you keep feeding it money, fooling you into thinking you're winning, even though you never hit the big jackpot.

Like a Trump rally. Trump puts his supporters in the same mindset as gamblers placing sucker bets on the roulette table or feeding slot machines. Trump constantly yaps about winning and making lots of money, like casino and lottery ads that promise the suckers instant riches.

Real winners don't constantly yap about winning. They're competent and confident in their abilities. They don't need constant adulation. Losers obsess about winning.

Trump is not a real winner: at heart, he's an insecure loser who's perpetuated the illusion of winning. He's failed at most of his business ventures. He's rich, but that's because he inherited millions from his daddy (he's tied for 121 in the Forbes 400 list with two women you've never heard of). People like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are real winners, people who started with an idea and got really rich.

Donald Trump is running his campaign like a slot machine or a lottery, promising his supporters that they're all going to win and they're all going to be really rich. The truth is, everyone who plays the Trump lottery is a loser, and if Trump wins the United States will be the biggest loser.

Winner Take All Predictions

For tonight's primary states, I predict the following.

On the Republican side,

Donald Trump will win Florida, Illinois, and North Carolina,

Ted Cruz will win Missouri

John Kasich will win Ohio

Marco Rubio going bye-bye

On the Democratic side,

Hillary Clinton will win Florida, North Carolina, Illinois, and Ohio.

Bernie Sanders will win Missouri,

With the Kasich win in Ohio and several Northeastern states to follow, the GOP race will become more convoluted than ever. Contested convention here we come!!

The Dark Heart of Nationalism

Fact Checking Trump

Good Words From The President

"We’ve got a debate inside the other party that is fantasy and schoolyard taunts and selling stuff like it’s the Home Shopping Network," Obama said in a clear reference to Trump's Tuesday-night press conference, where he wheeled out products like Trump Steaks and Trump Water to prove his business bona fides. 

"How can you be shocked?" he asked. "This is the guy, remember, who was sure that I was born in Kenya. Who just wouldn’t let it go. And all this same Republican establishment, they weren’t saying nothing. As long as it was directed at me, they were fine with it. They thought it was a hoot. Wanted to get his endorsement. And then now, suddenly, we’re shocked that there’s gambling going on in this establishment." 

Sounds familiar...:)

Poetic Justice

So, let's see here...mom brags on social media, "My right to protect my child with my gun trumps your fear of my gun" and then ends up accidentally getting shot in the back by that same child. 

Now she might be charged because Florida law requires guns to be secured from minors?

Poetic justice...

Three Year High

The president's approval rating has hit a three year high. Real Clear Politics has him at more approval than disapproval. That's good news for Hillary Clinton who seeks to continue the president's legacy.

Right around now is when Republicans will start to say that there were some good things that Barack Obama has done...:)

Why Do Polls Suck?

Today the big news was that Michigan primary was a huge upset! How huge? Sanders beat Clinton by a whole 0.5%.

That doesn't sound like much of an upset. In most of the states where Clinton isn't pounding Sanders into the ground with 60, 70 or 80% of the vote, they're running about equal. Which means Clinton is piling up delegates much faster than Sanders.

So why are they calling it an upset? Because the polls predicted that Clinton would win by 20 points. If Sanders had clobbered Clinton by the same amount that Clinton has clobbered Sanders by in other states, that would be an upset. Here, the polls were simply dead wrong.

By this point it should be obvious that polls don't work anymore, and this has been the case for several years. Karl Rove made an absolute ass of himself when he refused to believe that Obama won, because he trusted his polls more than the election itself.

Mark pointed to an article on fivethirtyeight.com about why the polls are wrong. It was a list of lame excuses from someone who still believes that polls can work. They can't. Polling is completely broken, and probably forever.

Here are the real reasons why polling has lost most of its credibility.

Most reasonable people just don't answer the phone if they don't recognize who's calling. They look at the caller ID or let their answering machine pick it up. Why? Every unsolicited phone call you get from an unknown number is

• someone you don't know calling during dinner or your favorite TV show or when you're working, or
• a crook trying to steal your personal information, your credit card, your bank account, or your identity, often posing as Microsoft Windows support, or
• a sales person trying to sell you something shady or something you don't want, or
• a crook from a phony charitable organization selling you some bogus sob story to steal your money, or 
• a paid telephone solicitor from a reputable charitable organization that is growing ever more desperate for donations because the disreputable scum bags are stealing all their donors.

That means that only schmoes with nothing but time to waste are picking up calls from unknown numbers. These people do not represent the average voter.

Pollsters used to only call landlines, which was beginning to significantly skew poll results. They have since changed that, and now call mobile numbers as well. Since mobile minutes cost real money, only really schmoey shmoes will waste their minutes talking to a pollster.

People who willingly pick up unsolicited calls frequently do so in order to mess with the caller, tying them up and wasting their time. Some think that lying to pollsters helps tweak the lamestream media, which faithfully and breathlessly report the latest poll numbers, which are increasingly wrong.

A lot of reasonable people who do pick up don't think it's anyone's business who they're going to vote for. They'll a) politely decline, b) just hang up, or c) lie to the pollster. Why? Because they have no way of knowing how that information will be used against them in the future. And it often will be used against you -- independent polls are completely free to sell your answers to political campaigns, who will use that information to dun you with more calls begging for money.

Rabid supporters will answer polls in order to "get their vote in" for their favorite candidate. These are generally a tiny and predictable fraction of the population, so they don't really tell you much about how the majority of the population will vote.

Many voters have the attention span of a gnat. They don't know anything about any of the issues. They often don't decide who they're voting for until they get in the voting booth. Polls tell you nothing when the electorate is so undecided, and though they try to control for this, clearly it's not working (this is the one excuse that 538 gave that holds water.)

For example: the most ridiculous thing I've heard voters say this cycle is, "I can't decide between Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump." (Jesse Ventura, among others, has said this.) This is like saying you can't decide between Attila the Hun and Mahatma Gandhi.

Some of these are simply clueless people. Others, like Ventura, are trying to sabotage the American political system. These saboteurs don't are about either candidate's stands on the issues, they just want to blow the system up.

News flash: nominating unelectable or unqualified candidates won't make the government work better. You'd think Ventura would have realized this after spending four years as governor of Minnesota when neither party had his back and the media hounded him for being such a thin-skinned lout.

Finally, there are Internet polls. These are conducted online, and most pollsters regard them as completely worthless because they aren't really random: it's a self-selecting population, and they are easily gamed by campaign organizations, and are also vulnerable to bot nets (like any other Internet scam).

Political campaigns and news organizations will continue to use polls, but their predictive value is nearing zero.

The only polls that really matter are the ones that actually elect candidates.

Nate Silver Was Wrong?

Why The Polls Missed Bernie Sanders’s Michigan Upset

Lower...

Not #1!!!

Trump As Hitler?

As Donald Trump continues to lead in the GOP primary, comparisons to Adolph Hitler's populist nationalism are creeping in to the mainstream conversation. I've thought of about ten different ways to talk about it but today DJ Tice said it the best in this editorial. Donald Trump, like Ross Perot before him, is essentially Hitler's act but in a different dialect. Further...

Another discomforting vision of demagoguery from its heyday was authored by Minnesota’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis. In “It Can’t Happen Here,” in 1935, before the full horrors of Nazism were revealed, Lewis conjured a satire in which U.S. Sen. Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip — “an inspired guesser at what political doctrines the people would like” — imposes fascism on America. Windrip gets himself elected president with promises one admirer calls “molasses for the cockroaches,” including: “that he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything … very low; that he was 100 percent for Labor, but 100 percent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds and nickel instead of importing them, that it could defy the World … and maybe, if that World was so impertinent as to defy America … take it over and run it properly.”

In short, buyers beware...