Tag Archives: nothing

2016 Was Not a Tight Race

by AlmaTillyard6 Posted on April 26, 2017

Mother Jones

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I suppose this is hopeless, but I want to try one more time on the Comey thing. The most common response to the suggestion that James Comey’s letter was the turning point in the 2016 campaign is this:

In a race this close, lots of things could have tipped the result. The Comey letter is just one of many.

But this isn’t true. Take a look at 538’s polling numbers in the final two weeks of the campaign:

On the day before Comey sent his letter, Hillary Clinton had a 6-point lead. There is no ordinary campaign event that plausibly could have turned that into a loss. Not dumb ad buys. Not bad internal polling. Not bad speeches by the candidate. Nothing. It’s just too big a lead.

The Comey letter was a bolt from the blue and it cost Clinton three percentage points. This is the only thing that made the race close to begin with. Once Clinton’s lead had been cut by three points, then an extra point of support for Trump in the last couple of days—which 538 and others missed—was just enough for Trump to eke out a 2-point popular vote loss and a miracle Electoral College victory.

That wouldn’t have mattered without the Comey letter. None of those little things that everyone keeps pointing to would have produced a Trump win. It’s true that in a tight race lots of things can make the difference between winning and losing, but it wasn’t a tight race. Not until James Comey sent out that letter, anyway.

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2016 Was Not a Tight Race

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Facebook and Google Are Spreading Way Too Many Lies

by NevilleGipson Posted on November 13, 2016

Mother Jones

Was the presidential election this year a close call? Of course not!

Kellyanne Conway, a key adviser to Donald Trump’s transistion team, says the general election “was not close” and the president-elect has a “mandate” to carry out the will of the people on issues ranging from Obamacare to national security. “This election was not close. It was not a squeaker,” Mrs. Conway said on “Fox News Sunday.” “There is a mandate there, and there is a mandate for his 100-day agenda, as well.”

Really? It sure seemed close to me. So close, in fact, that Donald Trump actually lost the popular vote. Let’s google “2016 popular vote” to find out:

It looks like Facebook isn’t the only one with a fake news problem. Surely one of the top three results on Google News shouldn’t be a nutbar blog dedicated to spreading false information about Hillary Clinton? How about giving a little higher weighting to actual news sources so this kind of stuff doesn’t happen?

Trump’s team is dedicated to telling us that the election was a landslide, and there are plenty of doofus sites out there who are happy to spread whatever lies will help that along. Nothing can stop this from happening, but at least big players like Facebook and Google should try not to help them along.

UPDATE: There’s also the problem of deliberately fake news sources. Mike Caulfield has more on that here.

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Facebook and Google Are Spreading Way Too Many Lies

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Emailgate Now a Parody of Itself

by WaylonClemente Posted on October 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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The FBI email story continues to get even more ridiculous. Here is the LA Times:

Investigators came across the emails while investigating whether Weiner violated federal law when exchanging sexually explicit texts with a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina, one official said….The emails were not to or from Clinton, and contained information that appeared to be more of what agents had already uncovered, the official said, but in an abundance of caution, they felt they needed to further scrutinize them.

There is literally nothing here. We have a bunch of emails from Huma Abedin to other people. The FBI has not read them yet and has no idea what they’re about. At first glance—presumably from scanning the subject lines and names of recipients—they appear to be duplicates of stuff we’ve already seen. And it will likely take several weeks before we know anything more.

There. Is. Literally. Nothing. Here.

WTF was Jim Comey thinking when he wrote his suggestive but ambiguous letter about these emails to eight congressional Republicans—each of them practically slavering for Hillary Clinton’s scalp—11 days before an election? And all of it based on absolutely nothing—a fact that he very carefully avoided admitting. Has he gone completely around the bend?

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Emailgate Now a Parody of Itself

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Hillary Clinton’s Pneumonia Seems to Have Helped Her

by DorisMunday Posted on September 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s an odd thing:

Around Monday or Tuesday of this week, Hillary Clinton’s favorables went up about four points and Donald Trump’s went down four points. In Clinton’s case, maybe her pneumonia generated some sympathy? In Trump’s case, it’s hard to figure out what might have happened. David Fahrenthold’s big story about Trump’s charity scams came out around then. The whole “deplorables” thing was getting some attention. And…that’s about it. Nothing really comes to mind that might account for a sudden downward spike.

So what’s going on? It could be that this is nothing but reversion to the mean after a couple of weeks of Emailgate and Foundationgate taking a toll. That would actually make some sense, since attitudes toward Clinton and Trump have been remarkably stable for the entire past year. In any case, maybe this will help panicky Dems to panic a little less.

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Hillary Clinton’s Pneumonia Seems to Have Helped Her

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Donald Trump’s Destruction Test of the Republican Party Continues Apace

by MelisaBlaubaum Posted on December 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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A few days ago, like an evil mastermind on 24, Donald Trump declared that if we wanted to fight terrorists we needed to target their families for death. Today he gave a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition and told the crowd, “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money.” Ha ha. Stupid money-grubbing Jews. As Judd Legum pointed out, this means that Trump has now insulted blacks, refugees, immigrants, Muslims, the disabled, and Jews.

I’m now going to double down on my belief that Trump is running the world’s greatest reality show here. I think he got bored one day and came up with an idea that tickled him: “I wonder just how deranged you can get and still retain the support of the tea party wingnuts?” So he made a $1 bet with some of his Democratic friends and performed a test run in 2012 with his maniacal birther stuff. But all that did was show the depth of his challenge. He’d have to do a lot more than that in 2016. He started off slow with wild claims about immigrant Mexican rapists, knowing it would draw in the rubes. Then he laughably claimed that he’d get Mexico to pay for a border wall. Nothing happened. He insulted John McCain for being a POW. Nothing happened. He started telling obvious lies. Nothing. He lied on national TV and was called on it a few minutes later. Nothing. He all but admitted that he knows diddly about the Bible. Nothing. He called evangelical darling Ben Carson a nutcase liar. Nothing. He claimed that thousands of Muslims in Jersey City celebrated 9/11. Nothing. He mocked a disabled reporter in front of the cameras. Nothing. He suggested taking out terrorist families. Nothing. He appeared on the radio show of a crackpot conspiracy theorist. Nothing. Now he’s insulted an audience of conservative Jews.

Trump is probably frustrated. He’s basically dialed it up to 11 already, and the crowds are still swooning. What does he have to do? Tell a story about how he was abducted by aliens back in the 90s? Promise to nuke Tehran if he’s elected president? Suggest the world would be a better place if we’d never invented any HIV treatments?

Even Trump must be scratching his head wondering what to do next. There’s gotta be something that finally goes too far. Right?

Link to article – 

Donald Trump’s Destruction Test of the Republican Party Continues Apace

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Nothing Matters

by JudyGearynnn Posted on December 22, 2014

Mother Jones

How are you? Feeling good? Feeling spry? Eager for 2015? Ready to give it your all? Make it the year when it all finally happens? When the stars align and you take those ideas in your mind and that ambition in your belly and match them with piss and vinegar and do something real? Something that will give your life meaning? Something that matters?

To borrow a phrase from some of 2014’s most depressingly successful content thieves entrepreneurs, “haha.”

Gizmodo:

The three people behind the immensely popular Twitter accounts @HistoryInPics and @EarthPix have raised $2 million from investors…According to TechCrunch, venture firms 500 Startups, Upfront Ventures, and Daher Capital have all thrown in for the social media start-up that as of a year ago was raking in about $50,000 a month. They’re now reportedly taking in about $1 million a month.

The Twitter accounts have become immensely popular online, amassing millions of followers in less than two years of existence. The company gets its content largely by scraping places like Reddit for images and captions. The only problem? The images are often fake and the captions are often wrong.

Life has no meaning. Nothing matters.

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Nothing Matters

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You Thought California’s Drought Couldn’t Get Any Worse? Enter Fracking.

by QBIBiancadiktn Posted on October 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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I have a great idea. Let’s take one of the globe’s most important agricultural regions, one with severe water constraints and a fast-dropping water table. And let’s set up shop there with a highly water-intensive form of fossil fuel extraction, one that throws off copious amounts of toxic wastewater. Nothing could possibly go wrong … right? Well…

Almost 3 billion gallons of oil industry wastewater have been illegally dumped into central California aquifers that supply drinking water and farming irrigation, according to state documents obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity. The wastewater entered the aquifers through at least nine injection disposal wells used by the oil industry to dispose of waste contaminated with fracking fluids and other pollutants.

The documents also reveal that Central Valley Water Board testing found high levels of arsenic, thallium and nitrates—contaminants sometimes found in oil industry wastewater—in water-supply wells near these waste-disposal operations.

That’s from the Center for Biological Diversity. Hat tip DeSmogBlog.

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You Thought California’s Drought Couldn’t Get Any Worse? Enter Fracking.

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Jack White’s Angsty, Exuberant "Lazaretto"

by MercedesMatthae Posted on June 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jack White
Lazaretto
Third Man/Columbia

He may be in his late thirties, but Jack White continues to display a callow, almost cartoonish exuberance on his second solo album. The same giddy energy that informed his tenure leading the White Stripes, when he often evoked the buoyant excesses of Led Zeppelin in a smaller format, is still present here, but the textures are more varied and satisfying. Flavored by tasty dollops of pedal steel, Hammond B3 organ, fiddle, synth and the like, the consistently engaging Lazaretto hopscotches eagerly from blues to country to hard rock, with White’s arresting man-on-fire vocals always front and center. For all his obvious pleasure at being able to make a racket, however, there’s also a strain of existential angst: “All the creatures have it hard now. Nothing but God is left to know. And why he left us all here hanging. With an illusion of a home,” White sings on “Temporary Ground,” suggesting bad times to come.

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Jack White’s Angsty, Exuberant "Lazaretto"

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