Posts by simon g
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Some day soon, some learned journal will explain the effect of the weakened Voting Rights Act on the 2016 election, It will be retweeted a bit and discussed in places like this by people better informed than me - and it will make no headlines at all. Which is a shame, because it will tell us a lot more than most talking heads that fill the news.
Turnout was suppressed, deliberately and systematically. That doesn't explain everything, but when the data has been properly examined, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it explains a lot. After 50 years of stop-start progress, democracy is going backwards in the USA.
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Hard News: The Long, Strange Trip, in reply to David Hood,
But the polls were wrong by some margin, across a range of individual states, each with their own characteristics.
There's much more involved here than margin of error.
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Those probability numbers were based (obviously) on the polls, which simply missed - or misread - millions of voters.
A familiar story, and one that is constantly repeated, as per the definition of madness. Followed by an inquest, followed by ... nothing changing.
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Hard News: The Long, Strange Trip, in reply to Mikaere Curtis,
It's more like 90-10 Trump, the states Clinton needed have almost all gone. Barring a Florida recount, or legal challenges anywhere, it's over.
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This is a nightmare. I can't even ...
Sincere hugs to all decent Americans. For the rest, enjoy what you have done (hint: you really won't).
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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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TV3 is set to dump Story. The "smart, fun and thought-provoking show that will lead the way in daily current affairs" was exactly none of those things.
It's time to prepare your bingo card for its replacement, and the promos: expect "edgy", "fearless" and "thinking outside the box".
I wouldn't mind these shows being predictably mediocre half as much if the networks didn't keep pretending they were the opposite.
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It's another one from the boilerplate, like every IPCA report.
Question: "Did Mr X steal a car?"
Answer: "Mr X did not commit murder."
Headline: "Exonerated!". -
The media reaction to this last debate is divided, not into "his v hers", Reps v Dems, but between those who get what just happened, and those who don't.
The latter are dullards still on auto-pilot, declaring who won which section and overall, as if it were just another debate. It's quite revealing (if a little eye-rolling) to watch people miss the point in a "How did you enjoy the play, Mrs Lincoln?" kinda way.
Whereas those who paid attention realize that none of the traditional point-scoring matters a jot. Because one candidate just pissed on the election itself. His team of spinners are now desperately un-pissing but too late - it doesn't flow uphill.
I almost feel sorry for Republicans. Almost.
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Hard News: Trump's Dummkopfs, in reply to Tom Johnson,
The moderator was weak, which didn’t help. But Kaine made the classic politician’s mistake of thinking “People will only know the truth if I tell it, I need to speak more”. Which means interrupting the lie before it has got through to the public.
Much better to do what Clinton did to Trump – let your opponent dig the hole, let the soundbites stand. Post-debate is far more important than the debate itself, and a bemused “Really?” works better than a recitation of corrections, unheard, unprocessed.
The Putin section was the classic example. Just say "do you agree with your guy or not?". Not repeating for the hundredth time what Trump said.