Democrats categorically deny their peer reviewed science..

Like I said, Democrats ONLY accept the science that supports their agenda..

Michale
473

Democrats categorically deny their peer reviewed science..

Like I said, Democrats ONLY accept the science that supports their agenda..

Global Warming is a religion to them. And their priests are right and other religion's priests are wrong..

Michale
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This has to be something major and generally accepted by mainstream science, similar to the rejection of climate change or evolution by many if not all of the Republican nominees.

I'd add:

* First president to appear on a comedy show on TV ("Laugh-In", Nixon's "Sock it... to me?")

:-)

-CW

This has to be something major and generally accepted by mainstream science, similar to the rejection of climate change or evolution by many if not all of the Republican nominees.

Democrats reject the science that doesn't suit their ideological agenda..

How is that any different from what you accuse Republicans of??

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Don't get me wrong.. In the political sense, we ALL are bigots...

CW did an excellent commentary on political bigotry a while back....

Michale
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1. Ending the draft
2. The EPA
3. Title IX
4. Desegregation of Southern schools
5. SALT
6. Ending Vietnam War
7. Ping-pong Diplomacy
8. Ending Bretton-Woods

Like I said.. Left Wingery's wet dreams...

Nixon would be a landslide Democrat Candidate in the here and now.. :D

There were the days when Republicans didn't reject science,

Democrats reject just as much science as Republicans reject...

That's the part you don't get...

Or a new center-right party to emerge from the bigoted, anti-science, anti-intellectual drivel we have to endure from so-called Republicans (RWNBs*) at the moment.

Do you REALLY want to talk about bigotry and anti-science??

Because I have THOUSANDS if not TENS OF THOUSANDS of examples of Left Wing bigotry and anti-science..

This comment of yours alone is RIFE with political bigotry...

But I guess bigotry and anti-science is perfectly acceptable when it comes from the Left, eh? :D

Michale
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1. Ending the draft
2. The EPA
3. Title IX
4. Desegregation of Southern schools
5. SALT
6. Ending Vietnam War
7. Ping-pong Diplomacy
8. Ending Bretton-Woods

There were the days when Republicans didn't reject science, were moving away from bigotry, led with the Olive branch rather than 'bomb-them-all' stupidity.

I wait patiently for the real Republican Party to return. Or a new center-right party to emerge from the bigoted, anti-science, anti-intellectual drivel we have to endure from so-called Republicans (RWNBs*) at the moment.

Nixon, like Reagan, would be booed off any Republican stage today.

* Republicans With No Brains :)

Considering the malfeasance and Above-The-Law'ness (an old word I just made up) of the current Administration, the man has a point..

Nixon gave us a LOT of wet-dream material for the Left Wingery... You would think the Left could overlook all that illegal stuff..

Like they do with Obama.. :D

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"Donald Trump — who, I should disclose, is an old friend, a fine and generous and loyal man, and a delightful companion — is striking very close to the heart of the American problem: the corrupt, dysfunctional political system and the dishonest press. My view, as persevering readers know, is that it all started to go horribly wrong with Watergate, when one of the most successful administrations in the country’s history was torn apart for no remotely adequate reason and the mendacious assassins in the liberal media have been awarding themselves prizes and commendations for 40 years since."

A new one - I've heard that all the bad things were due to the 1960's, moving off the gold standard, or a host of other quack theories - but that over zealous investigation of Watergate and that poor chap Nixon is a new one. Where do these guys think this stuff up :)

Pretty decent assessment of the issues... :D

I know ya'all will hate it even though it savages Bush... :D

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;)

Touche' :D

Seriously, my caveat on polls is well known...

Michale
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This is a WSJ poll, so who believes it - Carson beating Hillary - what a joke - do you get all your facts from well run polls by respected news organizations?????? I mean, WSJ? More like WTF?

;)

OK, OK, OK... I held my nose and actually LOOKED at the poll you posted..

Hillary gets trounced by Rubio and actually BEATEN by Carson! :D

So, I am not sure that's a poll ya want to be bragging about... :D

Michale
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http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/nbc-poll-clinton-would-trounce-trump-lose-rubio-carson-n478676

Actually, I am leaning towards Rubio...

But, it's an NBC poll..

'nuff said...

:D

Michale
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It was not the best of was not the worst of times. It was rag time. The candidates ragged on Obama the whole evening. Trump was not noticeably attacked.

http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/nbc-poll-clinton-would-trounce-trump-lose-rubio-carson-n478676

Politifact has a well-documented Left Wingery bias..

"Well-documented"? The George Mason's CPMA "study" (link) referred to in the USA Today article was thin. As far as I can tell, there does not appear to be a peer-reviewed journal article as the word "study" implies. If anything, it was something on the order of what I posted myself in comments a while back: a mere counting of which party told more falsehoods according to 100 particular examples.

The GM CPMA never states in the entirety of either of its two press releases that it found evidence of bias, per se. It did state that the recorded lies in the same set of items between June 2012 and Sept. 2012 showed that Politifact found more lies by Republicans than Democrats as compared to what the Washington Post's fact checking group did. So not well-documented here.

Others interpreted that Politifact's mere incidence of higher number of falsehoods told by Republicans than Democrats indicated bias on Politifact's part. This is a spurious conclusion. What if, of two people, one always tells lies and the other always tells the truth? When you tell me that, am I to conclude that you're biased against the person you say lies all the time or should I conclude that the person does indeed always lie? By this reasoning, one begs the question that unless the found incidents of lying is always equal then the fact checker is suspiciously biased and therefore, one could never find that one side may indeed lie more. In other words, one would never be capable of saying that Democrats lied more because to do so would invalidate the finding. Absurd.

Further, while the GM CPMA article did not claim that Politifact was biased, they did note that other fact checkers did not have the same numbers as did Politifact. Now mind you, we're talking about a small size over three months, and mind you, no examination of how faithfully the fact checkers checked those facts (how much wood would a wood chuck chuck?). In other words the GW CPMA article merely gave a bare quantitative tallying without any qualitative assessment. So what if Politifact did a better job of reviewing facts than those other fact checkers did?

The USA Today article you offered went beyond the GM CPMA press release and suggested that Politifact was biased but did so merely by casting doubt, not by any analytical claim. So by simply asking the question of if Politifact is biased, we're now to conclude that they are?

I am more than willing to consider that Politifact may be biased. But not on some simplistic basis that their numbers were higher for one party than the other. I am also willing to consider that perhaps another fact checker is better (i.e., less biased), but I'd want to understand how their methodology was different and just why we would consider them to be less biased than Politifact might be.

Do you have other documents to support your assertion of "well-documented... bias" by Politifact that isn't merely derivative of the GM CPMA 2013 article?

Ya'all's predictions ON Trump have been yada yada yada yada...

Michale
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Heh. Couldn't resist.

Touche... :D

But, as I mentioned, ya'all's predictions Trump have been far from accurate as well..

Sooo....... :D

Michale
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As to the accuracy of your gut feelings... how's President Romney doing in his third year of his first term?

Heh. Couldn't resist.

-CW

A Left Winger's reality is that everything is liberal...

A Right Winger's reality is that everything is conservative..

And then there are those of us in the middle who live in the REAL reality... :D

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that sounds a bit like someone else:

"reality has a well-known liberal bias."
~Colbert

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/peter-roff/2013/05/28/study-finds-fact-checkers-biased-against-republicans

Michale
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The one constant referral that rarely brings a challenge is RCP....

Michale
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Exactly! Hard to have a reasonable conversation when sources of news are dismissed without specific cause.

Rather like voir dire for a jury, we each get a few dismissals without cause, but at some point, we have to agree on a few to sit as sufficiently objective or at least methodologically transparent and defensible.

I like your proposal in #10. If not WSJ, Politifact, MSNBC, Limbaugh, Brietbart, then whom? And if no source is reasonably acceptable to both sides of an aisle, then any proposition asserted by either side becomes unfalsifiable, in which case there's little chance of a rational conversation.

If a critic is going to dismiss citations based on the writer without offering other sources that we could all consider, then their critique just becomes an True Scotsman argument no matter how dressed up.

We can also make a distinction when an article is transparently editorializing or intending to represent facts objectively. For instance, I may take most of Rush Limbaugh's assertions as editorial ranting but if he cites a study from, say, an academic journal, I'll at least listen and consider the study further by looking at it for myself.

I'm okay if a site like Fox News or Huffington Post clearly is framing their assertions from a editorial bias as long as I can tell what they intend to represent as fact versus opinion and when they give the basis or source for that factual representation.

For one, I nominate Politifact as a sufficiently objective source, primarily because they transparently use other sources to back up their claims. I see no better, more objective source to consider for the kinds of political-claim analysis that they do, but am open if others want to nominate them alongside or in place of Politifact. I am also open to WSJ (I may disagree with some of their editorials but generally their factual reporting is trustworthy). Still another is the Economist.

Those three aren't infallable of course, but are worthy of my presumption that they're at least trying to objectively get their facts right. There are others of course, but let's start there.

What I'm not okay with just dismissing sources out of hand, one after another, without cause or methodological analysis. We have to start somewhere.

I don't pretend to fully understand the Republican primary process. I don't think anybody does, including the Republicans that wrote the rules and the Republicans who have to game the rules to win. It's very complicated.

There are winner take all races, where a plurality gets the candidate all the delegates.

There are some contests that allocate votes proportionally, although proportionality is not according to population size or even Republican population size, and some have triggers that turn them into all or nothing contests if somebody gets more than 50% of the votes. Other races have floors, where anything below 20% doesn't count.

There are winner take most contests, but in practice these are pretty much like winner take all races.

There are apparently still some races where the vote is basically a serving suggestion for a follow-up caucus.

All this seems designed to give the Establishment Wing of the GOP a pretty big thumb on the nomination scales. Just how big is unclear.

I wouldn't even say I link Breitbart "often"...

I link HUFFPOOP more than I link Breitbart...

Michale
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My more or less weekly summary of the Betfair Exchange take on the Nomination:

Rubio is still the favorite, with a 40% implied probability of winning the nomination, down a bit from his high of 45%.

Cruz is in second place, at p=22.5%. He has been a steady climber over the past couple of months.

Trump is close behind Cruz with p=21%. Trump got a big bump from Paris, sagged a little bit, bumped up after San Bernardino, and bumped up a bit after the latest favorable polls, but is down today. Trump is the most volatile of the major candidates, but not nearly to the extent that is seen in the polls.

Jeb._ The market says we should not count Bush out entirely. He's been stable for the last few weeks, even trended a bit up. Figure his probability around 10%.

Betfair runs a separate market on who wins the Presidency. It's interesting that the order is somewhat different than the Nomination Market. Rubio is a commanding favorite (17%), but Trump is second at around 9%, Cruz 8% and steadily climbing. Bush rates a 4%. Compare and contrast with the Market's perception of Clinton, about 57%.

One other comment on the markets. As I see it, polls look at now, the Markets look out to the summer.

No, not really. Can you prove the bias in this poll? Is there a problem with the way it was conducted? How about the Wall Street Journal? Are they biaed? Or only when they disagree with your point?

Actually, I rarely link to Breitbart polls for the exact reasons I stated that MSNBC links are not worth the electrons they are printed on...

But you do link to Breitbart often...

NBC?? Brian Williams...

'nuff said...

Not that it should matter with your propensity to link to Breitbart...

Actually, I rarely link to Breitbart polls for the exact reasons I stated that MSNBC links are not worth the electrons they are printed on...

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416

But it's not an MSNBC poll, which you would have known had you followed the link. It's a third party poll conducted for NBC/WSJ.

Not that it should matter with your propensity to link to Breitbart...

Howz that for fair.. :D

Michale
415

My gut..

And my gut is a LOT more accurate than MSNBC in this regard.. :D

Time will tell who is right and who is wrong..

But let's face it...

Ya'all's track record on predicting Trump's demise is WORSE than my track record on picking SCOTUS rulings.

And THAT says a lot.. :D

Michale
414

Sounds like evidence for the motivation to limit coverage of Bernie... or is somebody claiming he's receiving 30% of the media coverage on the Dem side?

A

Ya' have to ask? That's why I just repackaged the same poll under the WSJ. I figured he wouldn't notice...

As Nate Silver puts it:

"Historically, in fact, there has been nearly a one-to-one correspondence between a candidate’s share of media coverage and his share of the vote in the polls. That is, other things held equal, a candidate earning 30 percent in national polls tends to get about 30 percent of the media coverage, while one polling at 10 percent will get 10 percent of it instead. It’s just that simple."

In other words, at this point in a presidential cycle, the media buzz tail wags the pollster dog.

If you want more details backing that up see:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-boom-or-trump-bubble/

Cohn's entire article is well worth a read.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/polls-suggest-trump-will-win-between-8-percent-and-64-percent-of-the-vote/

The WSJ is hardly a friend to the left.

Any references (not opinions) to back up the 4-1 claim?

Thought not.

Recent horse race polls seem to be driving the first proposition...plus most of the news media.

It can't be stressed enough that past experience shows that national poll averages at this stage of the game aren't highly predictive of actual outcomes.
There is a positive correlation to be sure, but it is weak. Just slop in the following chart:

https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/enten-pollsarenotpredictive-1.png?w=610&h=703

As Nate Cohn put it over at 538 "Polls Suggest Trump Will Win Between 8 Percent And 64 Percent Of The Vote." That's a pretty big spread.

Another Cohn observation is that poll taken a year earlier in cycle are historically no more predictive than polls taken now!

'nuff said... :D

How about the same poll numbers from the Wall Street Journal:

http://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/NBCWSJDecemberPoll2015EARLY.pdf

If that is too biased, you will have to give the list of approved outlets. And follow that list yourself, heh...

The first is that Trump is approaching unstoppable status. In other words, he will win the nomination. I still think this is unlikely, but not impossible.

The second is that most, or at least a lot, of the Republican field will drop out after the next debate. This DOES seem highly likely to me. "Sour stench of desperation" is about right.

I'm upload the rest of this in chunks, due to multiple links and recent problems with the ol' spam filter. I'm also locking the cats out of the office, since The Tabby has recently discovered how much fun it is to play with my laser driven mouse and trigger finger.

heh

Michale
409

Would you buy that?? :D

Michale
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'nuff said... :D

Michale
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Here is the latest poll that includes independents

"Against Trump, the Democratic front-runner would win 50 percent to 40 percent. Among independents, she would capture 43 percent of the vote, compared to 36 percent for Trump. Among Hispanics, Clinton would get 69 percent of the vote, compared to just 24 percent for Trump."

Source: http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/A_Politics/15564%20NBCWSJ%20December%20Poll%20(AM%2012-14-15%20Release).pdf

Ya'all have consistently misjudged the American people and what they really want...

As I have said before, NO CANDIDATE can win without the INDEPENDENT/NPA vote...

And those votes are swinging 4-1 for Trump...

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There's been some pushback by establishment Repubs to the rabid Muslim bashing, so it will be interesting if that challenge to the base (no pun intended) continues onstage or remains relegated to venues where it doesn't alienate the frothy faced masses.

The Trumpon walking back his clampdown bit by exempting wealthy Muslims who want to stay at his hotels, like a typical Repub hypocrite and class warrior, will of course go unchallenged. Because, despite the massive amounts of evidence to the contrary, wealthy Muslims (cough, cough Saudis etc.) are never up to no good or actively involved in aiding our enemies, right?

A