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Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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Can California form its own country?

Alex meets the President.

Adam Conover: The sinister reason weed is illegal:

David Pakman: Hillary Clinton leads Donald Трамп by more than one million votes.

Sam Seder: Can Obama make a Supreme Court recess appointment?

The Sexual Predator, Путин Puppet, President Elect:

David Pakman: NSA Chief, Russia hacked the 2016 election.

Mental Floss: 39 U.S. City Name origins.

Minute Physics: Is the moon held up by a spring? How perspective shapes reality.

David Packman: Racist assholes call Michelle Obama an “ape in heals”.:

Joe Biden: Building on a record of economic progress.

Kimmel: The week in unnecessary censorship.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Open Thread

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In Monday’s Open Thread, I mentioned that I’d like to keep a Washington State exchange. But the more I think about it, the more I would like Washington State to just set up a public option of our own and sell it across state lines. Maybe we can keep our exchange and sell the public option to Washington State residents at cost, but sell it to the rest of the country at a profit. Of course, we’d probably need a Democratic State Senate to make that happen, but it’s worth the push.

0pen Thread: November 16

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There may be a lot of internally displaced refugees in Trump’s America. If Kansas collapses under its own weight, it may be that nobody can save them. If ICE raids are as bad as we fear, people might move to sanctuary cities. If police aren’t even doing the basics to protect Black people, Latin Americans, or gay people, they might have to move to other parts of the country where they feel safer.

I say this as a warning for Seattle and Washington: We have to get our shit together. We have to solve our homeless problem because more people are coming (and because it was always the right thing to do). We have to make sure people still have health care here because healthy people in Washington are more productive, and more people coming are going to need it (also, because it’s the right thing to do). We have to get serious about police reform so people who come here aren’t afraid of them (also, it’s the right thing to do).

I generally push back against people who say people who don’t like policies in their state should move to a more liberal state. But if we want to be an option for people, we have to work on ourselves.

For the Good of the Nation President Obama Must Martyr Hillary Clinton, Not Pardon Her

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screen-shot-2016-11-15-at-10-59-31-am

Jesus Christ, I just have to take a moment to remark on what is perhaps the stupidest fucking editorial ever from the Seattle Times, a newspaper that has turned stupid fucking editorials into a veritable art form:

PRESIDENT Obama should pre-emptively pardon Hillary Clinton to protect her and the United States from a vindictive, showboat prosecution by the incoming Trump administration.

No, NO, NO… President Obama should not pardon Hillary Clinton under any circumstance! A pardon would be understood by the vast majority of Americans both as an admission of guilt and as conclusive evidence of endemic corruption in the Democratic establishment! How fucking stupid can the Seattle Times be not to see the politics of the situation through to its logical conclusion?

While I understand and even agree with the editorial board’s impulses (“The danger to America is not Clinton’s freedom but in having a presidency that even threatens to use its power for vendettas and jailing opponents”), it is far too late for such democratic high-mindedness. The threat has already been made! And the American people (well, the Electoral College) rewarded Trump for it with the White House. Obama pardoning Clinton would only embolden and enrage the trumpenproletariate, while freeing Chancellor Trump from the responsibility of fulfilling one of his most disturbing campaign promises.

Rather, cold political calculus tells us that we must let Trump be Trump. We must not allow him to escape this defining moment. He must either demonstrate to his base the weakness that is at the vile heart of all tyrants, or demonstrate to the world how little he honors the rule of law, let alone our nation’s two-and-a-quarter centuries of peaceful transfer of power.

A Clinton show trial would no doubt be a shock to the American psyche and a permanent scar on our nation’s world standing. But so would the show trials of Clinton underlings that would no doubt ensue should the Trump regime be denied its promised revenge (a Clinton pardon should be a sign for Huma Abedin to flee the country). It may be too late to avoid this trauma. But at least it would finally and totally rip away the fiction that there is anything normal about the alt-right regime that has seized the White House.

If Trump prosecutes Clinton, he turns her into a martyr of the democratic resistance. But if President Obama pardons Clinton, he transforms the two of them into political villains against which the Republicans will effectively run for decades to come. It isn’t fair. It isn’t comforting. But that is the America in which we now all live.

It is also an America that newspapers like the Seattle Times helped create through their endless coverage of the trumped up email witch hunt, and a shameful campaign of false equivalency that now trivializes “go hang yourself” and “go back to India” as mere “complaints” while characterizing Breitbart’s obvious and indisputable white nationalism as a mere he-said/she-said allegation of “critics say“—the critics explicitly othered on the paper’s front page as “angry … Jewish and Muslim groups.”

Like most of the rest of media, the Trump-normalizing Seattle Times has surrendered the moral authority to even report the news, let alone comment upon it. It does not matter if the editorial board’s motives were good: their advice is more than just wrong, it is dangerous.

The sole purpose of a free press is to safeguard democracy. On this the Seattle Times and the rest of the old guard news media utterly failed. So please, Seattle Times, for the sake of our nation, shut the fuck up before you do more harm.

Drinking Liberally — Seattle

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DLBottle

The election is over, and one thing is clear: we have a lot of work to do! Please join us Tuesday evening at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally for a post-election debriefing and discussions about the future.

We meet every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. You’ll find us in the small room at the back of the tavern beginning about 8pm.




Can’t make it to Seattle on Tuesday night? Check out one of the other 189 chapters of Living Liberally, including twenty in Washington state, three in Oregon and one in Idaho. Find, or go out and start, a chapter near you.

Open Thread: November 14

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Soooo, does anyone have the first clue what happens to states like Washington that have our own health care exchanges if Obamacare is repealed? If they replace it with a you-can-buy-plans-across-state-lines, what sort of restrictions can and should we add to it then? Can we do a multi-state, West Coast exchange? It would probably require Congress if it’s a governmental thing.

HA Bible Study: Revelation 17:8

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Revelation 17:8
The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.

Discuss.

Poll and prediction postmortem podcast

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curmudgeonscornerLast Thursday, I was a guest on the Curmudgeon’s Corner podcast post-election edition. The host, Sam Minter, does his own polling aggregation site at ElectionGraphs.com. Along with co-host Iván Bou, we discuss the polling results from the election, our own final predictions and how they fared with other such sites for the first part of the podcast.

For the second part of the podcast, we explored the causes and consequences of the “greatest upset in electoral history,” and examine some possible responses to a single-party government.

Listen to the podcast here.

Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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John Oliver: Multilevel Marketing.

Young Turks: So…George Zimmerman walks into a bar…

Samantha Bee: A beautiful, faraway dream.

VSauce: Is it okay to touch Mars?

White House: West Wing Week.

David Pakman: Marijuana wins in 5 more states.

Catastrofuck 2016. America Elects a Racist, Sexist, Groping, Philandering, Swindling Narcissist:

Mental Floss: 28 facts about The Beatles.

Slate: The election in facial expressions.

Do Presidents get paid after leaving office?

Young Turks: GOP gloats about suppressing Black vote.

Bill Maher with Eric Holder: Abolish the electoral college.

Daily Show: Bringing America together again.

Get ready for an extra special supermoon.

Late Show: Choke it down.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Open Thread: 11/11

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Darryl already did a Veteran’s Day Open Thread, but since I wrote this yesterday and was going to post it today, here it is, a bit late:

It’s Veteran’s Day, and so it’s Armistice Day. On this day On this day 98 years ago, a madness of war ended. Mechanized slaughter stopped. The War to End All War didn’t, obviously, so we still mint new veterans. But while all war didn’t end, that war did. And today’s conflicts will end. What we replace them with is up to us.

So here’s to a Veteran’s Day in the future where there are no veterans. Where war has been eliminated for so long that the idea becomes impossible to imagine. Here’s to a future where we don’t send people off to mechanized slaughter or whatever the fuck else we can dream up.

Until that day, a thank you to the veterans who read this.

2016 National Polling

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How did the pollsters do for the 2016 election? That is a big and complicated question, because there are many different types and levels of polling done. In this post, I’ll look at the national polling in the Clinton—Trump race.

If my Twitter feed is any indication, the media seems hell-bent on the meme that “the polling was terrible” or “this is the end of polling.” But, as I show below, it wasn’t completely terrible for the national polling.

Yesterday, I heard a story on KUOW (I don’t remember the show, but perhaps All Things Considered or Here & Now) about the national polls. The story had things exactly wrong. They interviewed the director of the LA Times/USC poll (you know, the one that consistently had Trump leading Clinton), introducing it as “the one that got it right.” In fact, the LA Times/USC poll was the one that got it wrong.

Remember, national polls only tell us about the popular vote. And, as of this morning, Clinton leads in the popular vote. The LA Times/USC poll does use very interesting methods, asking their internet panel of respondents the probability of voting for each candidate. That is very cool (except for the internet panel part). But ultimately something about their poll led them to, almost uniquely, pick the wrong winner.

There are other criteria besides picking the right/wrong winner that are useful for evaluating the polls. A natural criterion is to ask which poll gets the percentages closest. That is what I have done. I’ve taken the national polling data as posted by Real Clear Politics and statistically evaluated “goodness of fit” between the poll result and the actual election outcome (as of this morning). The test I use is call a G-test of Goodness of Fit.

First I begin with the polls that did 2-way Clinton–Trump match-ups. Here are the polls from 31 Oct on, sorted newest to oldest (click for a larger image):

table1

The “fit” of the poll is better for smaller numbers in the X^2 column, and the last column gives, essentially, the probability of observing deviations from the actual outcome at least this large given the sample size, assuming the poll was a true reflection of the outcome. I’ve highlighted the best fitting with darker colors (orange). The shades of yellow denote other polls that do not differ significantly. The worst fitting, those that differ significantly from the results, are shown in white.

The best polls are the four highlighted in orange, in order: The Gravis poll taken on 31 October, the FOX News poll taken from 1-3 Nov, IBD/TIPP Tracking poll taken 4-7 Nov, and the McClatchy poll taken 1-3 Nov. Odd that the three oldest polls are the closest.

The worst poll, by far, was the NBC News/Survey Monkey online tracking poll. This poll was way too optimistic for Clinton.

The LA Times/USC poll was middling. There is only a 6% probability of observing results this bad by chance. And, of course, the poll got the wrong winner.

But we see, using 4-way races, most of the national polls were, statistically, in the ball park. Ten of 14 weren’t had outcomes that were not statistically different from the actual election.

Here is the polling for the 4-way race. The extra two categories (Johnson and Stein) provides for more ways a poll can “deviate” from the observed election results, so the polls don’t fit as well overall. Many polls are heavily penalized for doing a lousy job in the Johnson or Stein percentages, even if the Trump and Clinton percentages are okay.

table2

The best poll was by Gravis on 1-2 Nov. A later Gravis poll taken 3-6 Nov was actually one of the worst polls.

We see that, looking at a four-way race, the pollsters did not do that well. Only two of 19 polls did the results not differ significantly from the actual four-candidate distribution.

But what if we only consider the races that matter—Clinton and Trump? I’ve taken the four-way races and turned them into 2-way races. Mathematically, when doing the test, I “normalize” the results so that the sum of Clinton and Trump percentages are now 100%.

table3

We see that for 14 of the 19 polls, the results did not differ from the actual outcome. Again, the worst poll, by far, was the NBC News/Survey Monkey online tracking poll. With such a large sample, they should have been much closer than they ended up being.

So, whatever you’ve heard, the national polls were generally not that far off in predicting two outcomes of the popular vote: The winner of Clinton v. Trump, and the relative proportions of Clinton v. Trump votes.

Open Thread 11-9

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Jesus, guys. I love the American ideal, but damn did we not live up to it last night. I know Darryl has a lot of analysis, but all I have is hope.

The markets seem to know this is bad, but all I have is hope. Hope that we can figure something out at the state level if Obamacare gets repealed. Hope that we can survive it. Hope that we can prevent national stop and frisk. Hope that the bottom isn’t as far as we think it is. It’s scary. And it’s infinitely scarier if you’re not white. If you’re not a man. If you’re not Christian. America is trying to tell a lot of people that it’s not for them, but I still have hope because America still is for all Americans.

I don’t know what the future holds, but even now, when we’ve elected a man who looks like a fascist, and while there are checks and balances, the other branches are also controlled by Republicans, so who the fuck knows? Anyway, I’m much drunker writing this at 11:30 than I usually am just in general (and sorry (?) it’s so late). In conclusion, fuck, but don’t give up hope.

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