Hard News: The Long, Strange Trip
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Trump, the New Yorker, is jeered by New Yorkers as he goes to vote.
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The Influence looks at what's at stake for drug policy.
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The Bellingcat live blog is tracking voter intimidation and other polling-place issues, including bogus memes already being circulated by nutbar Trump supporters.
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if anything sums up this election for me its this song
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There's been lots of reporting on turnouts of various ethnic groups, like the latino vote, and drawing conclusions.
How is this measured in the US? Is it just people standing outside voting booths looking at voters' skin colour or listening to accents or languages or something?
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Russell Brown, in reply to
How is this measured in the US? Is it just people standing outside voting booths looking at voters’ skin colour or listening to accents or languages or something?
I've been wonder about this – the reports haven't been entirely clear, but I imagine it's more along the lines of exit polling.
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This American Life commissioned Sara Bareilles to write a musical theatre song about Obama's election eve thoughts. Leslie Odom Jr (fresh from 'Hamilton') sings 'Seriously'.
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Vox Voter Suppression Interactive h/t @Dovil (who everyone follows, right?)
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Also Jezebel's liveblog includes a calming livestream of kittens playing...
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The Long, Strange Trip…
Indeed, or more correctly in Dead…Truckin, up to buffalo. been thinkin, you got to mellow slow
Takes time, you pick a place to go, and just keep truckin on.*Sometimes the lights all shinin’ on me;
Other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip its been.I wonder which way the massive Dead Head electorate votes?
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Samantha Bee interviews Russian troll-farm mercenaries merrily spreading chaos in the US election:
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Trump, the New Yorker
If Trump gets in - I have the masthead of a new magazine ready!
:- ) -
BEST BUG EVER. Whatever words you choose to add to the end of the URL for this part of Trump’s website (i.e.: after /archive/) will appear in the masthead for the page . Play at home and share!
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While I've never followed any previous US election this closely, I guess that applies to half the world... in a watching-a-train-wreck-as-absurdity-overtakes-reality kinda way. It's been an almost numbing experience.
While it's not in the best of taste, I'd like to share my favourite quote of the campaign so far -- Seth McFarlane describing Donald Trump's massive ego.
"When Trump bangs a supermodel, he closes his eyes and imagines he's jerking off."
And for those who can't be bothered with session cookies, the Washington Post is giving all readers free digital access for the next two days. Nice.
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There have been some interesting insights recently on where the bafflement and bullshit comes from. First, kids in Macedonia making fake-new websites for the advertising traffic.
And Sam Bee's fascinating chat with a couple of the army of people who troll for Putin:
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It's a strange election. The result is in no doubt and has been in no doubt for over a month.
Even the Senate race doesn't look particularly close.
So we have this weird thing where the media try and find some way to make it seem exciting and the problem is that means Trump's racist misogynistic drivel has had way more airtime than it should have.
That to me has been the most depressing thing seeing the media here in the US and here make the divisive hate politics of Trump appear more successful than it really is.
They could have spent time talking about and analysing the actual policies of the next President Clinton. But instead they made up a fake "contest" and spent all their time talking about "the race". I guess that was always going to be easy mode journalism.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
It’s a strange election. The result is in no doubt and has been in no doubt for over a month.
Even the Senate race doesn’t look particularly close.
So we have this weird thing where the media try and find some way to make it seem exciting
Duncan Garner's "can Hillary still win?" question on Story last night was a bit of a WTF.
They could have spent time talking about and analysing the actual policies of the next President Clinton.
Bernie Sanders has been good value on the policy platform, but you're right, there's been bugger-all. Honourable exception: the New Yorker's endorsement essay, which didn't shy from Clinton's shortcomings, but said this:
A chasm lies between a candidate’s promises and a President’s legislative accomplishments, but the ambitions must be assessed, however partial their eventual enactment. In many ways, Clinton’s campaign is the antithesis of campaigns during past times of economic uncertainty. She offers no soaring rhetoric on the order of “Morning in America,” “A Bridge to the 21st Century,” or “Yes We Can.” What she does offer is a series of thoughtful and energetic proposals that present precisely the kind of remedies that could improve the lives of many working-class and poor Americans of all races. She would simplify the tax code for small businesses and streamline their licensing requirements. She would increase health-care tax credits through the Affordable Care Act, which, in theory, would both expand coverage and reduce the burden on employers. She would also seek to expand access to Medicaid and would extend Medicare to people as young as fifty-five. She would substantially increase funding for community health centers and provide significant federal support for child care. And her college-affordability plan would help students refinance debt, and support states that subsidize tuition.
Clinton’s tax plans are also designed to promote broader-based affluence. She would increase the tax rate on short-term capital gains for high earners, with lower rates for longer-term holdings; close the “carried-interest” tax loophole that favors hedge-fund managers; and levy fees on banks with high debt levels. She would impose a four-per-cent surcharge on incomes above five million dollars a year, and adopt a minimum thirty-per-cent tax rate on incomes above a million dollars a year. She supports an “exit tax” and other fiscal adjustments that would discourage so-called corporate inversion—the offshoring of companies to tax havens like Ireland. And she proposes tax incentives for investing in towns that have faced significant losses in manufacturing jobs. To address the compounding effects of trade and technology on displaced workers, she would promote training, and include a tax credit for businesses that take on apprentices. She would allocate $275 billion over five years to infrastructure improvement, focussing on transit and water systems, which should create employment while reducing inefficiencies.
In general, Clinton’s tax plan is less advantageous to the financial industry and more conducive to jobs-intensive enterprises. Despite her reputation for being overly solicitous of Wall Street, Clinton has strong proposals to prevent large financial institutions from taking on risks that could derail the economy again. She promises to defend the Dodd-Frank reforms (which Trump, like all the Republican candidates, has pledged to overturn) and to build on them. She would impose new fees on risk; strengthen the Volcker Rule, which prevents banks from making potentially disastrous bets with government-backed deposits; and bring regulatory light into the so-called shadow banking system, where much of the 2008 financial crisis began. She would demand that hedge funds and other large financial firms provide far more information to regulators about their trading activity, and her Administration would prevent those firms from becoming so overleveraged that a faulty bet could bankrupt them and lead to widespread economic crisis.
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Rich of Observationz, in reply to
The result is in no doubt and has been in no doubt for over a month.
How does a 4% lead equate to 'no doubt'? Especially when Trump supporters might well tend not to admit it to pollsters?
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One useful aspect of the saturation coverage is that we can see how cumbersome voting is in the USA (though it depends on each individual state). It's easy to mock Americans for their poor turnouts, but I wonder what ours would be like if we had to queue for ages, and then had to do a lengthy school assignment once we got in the polling booth.
Voter-suppression, on t'other hand, is a partisan nightmare we're better off without.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
How does a 4% lead equate to ‘no doubt’? Especially when Trump supporters might well tend not to admit it to pollsters?
Because the US system is a state by state FPP system, like the old NZ system where Labour had the majority of the vote but lost because National got more electorates. The national vote is nearly irrelevant. The polling in the key states has shown Clinton to have a massive lead.
The polls would have to be very wrong in around 15-20 states for Clinton to lose.
Polls can be wrong but in all probability Clinton has been a slam dunk for a month now.
And even if the polls are wrong it is likely that they will under-represent the votes of the poor and minorities so it's a good guess that if anything the polls under-represent Clinton's majority.
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That BBC page shows Clinton as either behind or ahead by less than 4% in all of 13 swing states except Virginia and Wisconsin. Do you have better data?
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Not saying Trump *will* win, but that there is a finite probability that he will.
Australian TAB has him at 6.0. The US treasury market is a lot more bearish.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
Last week Huffington Post had Clinton at 98% probability of a win, 538 has had Clinton over 60% probability from day one and their numbers have been massaged in favour of Trump.
You're right of course there is always a chance of a Trump win - hey I bought a lotto ticket yesterday - but for Trump to win he needs to overturn the polling in a whole sequence of states - it is just really unlikely and has been for over a month.
Hence the story should not have been "who will win?"
But should have been "what will President Clinton's policies mean for the US and NZ?"
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BenWilson, in reply to
When the polling in the states is taken, and the variance in the polls modeled, and then Monte Carlo simulations of all of that applied to the actual electoral race, FiveThirtyEight is still giving Trump a 30% chance of winning up to yesterday. That's an actual probability, not some other kind of number. So it's not "no doubt". It's "scarily close". It's still likely to be Clinton, but definitely not a shoo in.
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