Dave Pell on Trump:

Even if you find him contemptible, Trump is doing what no presidential candidate has ever dared to do. He’s being himself. While it’s undeniable that Himself is a total dick, at least he’s presenting the same himself in presidential debates as he does in business and entertainment.

I hate Trump’s politics. And I hate most things he says. But I love that he’s saying it, and even how he’s saying it. He is doing to our absurd political races and the equally absurd way we cover them exactly what needs to be done.

He is making a complete mockery of the complete mockery.

Trump acts like a bratty teenager: He makes fun of peoples’ looks and tweets whatever is in his head, sans filter. This is why I feel like Trump is going to get bored running for president. A mind as petty and immature as his can hold interest in one thing for so long before he moves on to his next thing.

What did the men who would be president talk about during last week’s prime-time Republican debate? Well, there were 19 references to God, while the economy rated only 10 mentions. Republicans in Congress have voted dozens of times to repeal all or part of Obamacare, but the candidates only named President Obama’s signature policy nine times over the course of two hours. And energy, another erstwhile G.O.P. favorite, came up only four times.

Strange, isn’t it? The shared premise of everyone on the Republican side is that the Obama years have been a time of policy disaster on every front. Yet the candidates on that stage had almost nothing to say about any of the supposed disaster areas.

And there was a good reason they seemed so tongue-tied: Out there in the real world, none of the disasters their party predicted have actually come to pass. President Obama just keeps failing to fail. And that’s a big problem for the G.O.P. — even bigger than Donald Trump.

—G.O.P. Candidates and Obama’s Failure to Fail, Paul Krugman

Elias IsQuith on the whole Uber-vs-DeBlasio thing:

When it comes to American politics, “progress” has no set definition. But it is usually associated with figures who in another era would’ve been called “liberal.” Progressives are almost always supportive of LGBT rights, feminism and the sexual revolution; and that’s forward-thinking in its way. But when de Blasio (or most anyone else) calls himself a progressive, he isn’t claiming to be a man of the future. He’s merely signaling to voters that his ideal government is hands-off on sexuality but supportive of the welfare state.

It shouldn’t be necessary to point this out, but there’s nothing about that version of progress that requires de Blasio be nice to Uber. The kind of progress that Uber represents (which is technological, not social or political) has nothing to say about civil rights or redistribution. It doesn’t have a point of view; it just is. But because we use the same word for two different concepts, many of us assume — often unconsciously — that political and technological progress always walk hand-in-hand.

As IsQuith says, being technically progressive and politically progressive are not the same thing.

George Carlin didn’t vote.

Russell Brand is charming and can be persuasive when you see him on television, but it seems his abilities end with his rhetorical skills:

But Brand isn’t a writer, no matter how much he fancies himself one, so fairness demands we cut him a tiny bit of slack. He is, though, a comedian, so there is little excuse for the painfully limp jokes, often lurking at the end of a sentence in parentheses: “You know me, when I started this book I really thought I might be able to write my version of, I dunno, Mein Kampf (whatever happened to that guy?)”; “I mean, if Gandhi can write a letter to Hitler, lovingly requesting that he step back from genocide (that went well!)”; “He–remarkably and with a straight face–tied it in to 9/11 (you remember those towers; there were two of ’em, I think)”; “…that cuddly ol’ Thatcher chum, General Pinochet–although if you ask me he wasn’t that general; he was specifically a bit of a bastard.”

Oh dear.

The problem here isn’t so much that Brand knows nothing about history, is politically naive, doesn’t understand even the rudiments of economics, can’t write, and manages 320 pages without producing a single laugh. It’s that his self-righteousness often veers into the authoritarian.
And he’s selling t-shirts with his face in the ‘Che Guevara pose’ on his website. Good lord.

I’m the type of liberal that believes government is the single greatest agent for social justice that mankind has ever invented. I believe in strong regulation of business, because the market does not prevent unethical behavior, nor does it punish such practices in an effective fashion. Without regulation, our water would be undrinkable, our air would be unbreathable, our cars would be deathtraps, and our collective life expectancies would be years, if not decades, shorter, due to all the carcinogens our bodies would absorb. Without the flawed financial regulations we have, tens of millions of us would be living in abject indentured servitude to banks.

I believe in progressive taxation and the social safety net. I believe in investment in infrastructure. I believe in sensible national defense, and that the military-industrial complex has siphoned away trillions of dollars too much in my lifetime. I believe it is a travesty that although we have the greatest economy the world has ever seen (that crown will be, or has already been, given up, depending on the source), we do not have universal healthcare for our people.

I am horrified by the role money has taken in our politics since the Citizens United ruling. Politics, as described by Robert Caro, has always been about the acquisition and distribution of funds. Whichever politician has control of the most money also has the most power. But, the ability of a small number of wealthy Americans to influence members of Congress with their riches has overwhelmed the system, reducing the significance of a single vote.
—Bryan Larrick, A Voter’s Lament

So, this whole government shutdown? Republicans have had it planned for a while:

With polls showing Americans deeply divided over the law, conservatives believe that the public is behind them. Although the law’s opponents say that shutting down the government was not their objective, the activists anticipated that a shutdown could occur — and worked with members of the Tea Party caucus in Congress who were excited about drawing a red line against a law they despise.

A defunding “tool kit” created in early September included talking points for the question, “What happens when you shut down the government and you are blamed for it?” The suggested answer was the one House Republicans give today: “We are simply calling to fund the entire government except for the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare.”
Partisan politics. So effective.

America, home of the free[ly monitored]:

The federal government will continue to access Americans’ emails without a warrant, after the U.S. Senate dropped a key amendment to legislation now headed to the White House for approval.

What bullshit.

A little note on The New York Times’ coverage of the U.S. Presidential Election from this past week.

First: I love that they took down their paywall until it was over. I think that was a thoughtful gesture by an organization wanting an informed public.

Second: They continue to bust out solid data visualizations.

Sometimes a visualization (when done right) can communication things words cannot, or at least communication things more concisely.

Below are some screenshots I took the night of the election.

Daily Exhaust doesn’t focus on politics (unless Shepard Fairey decides to make a new Obama poster), but if you’re interested in commentary on the U.S. presidential election, fellow Exhauster Bryan will be updating his site, Missile Test, throughout the night tonight (as well as pulling his hair out and watching his blood pressure rise).

See everyone on the other side.

Over at FiveThirtyEight, statistician Nate Silver has been aggregating and analyzing polling data in order to predict the outcome of this year’s presidential election. What a person will notice from his, and other analyses done by observers trying their best to be objective, is that the race has not been as close as the media would have you believe. President Obama can lose tomorrow, but Silver’s model has the race as anything but a tossup. See this mornings predictions below:

What Silver has been doing in this, and past elections, is try to get past the noise of pundits and news organizations that offer predictions without really delving into the complexity of the available data. It’s not new, but he has shown that even the best news organizations are still operating from their own self-interests, painting the race as much closer than it really is in a not-totally-concsious effort to keep the race exciting. I’m a big fan of news media, especially newspapers, having grown up in a household with both parents employed by newspapers. But while news organizations are invaluable in reporting things that have already happened, they are generally weak in their predictive capacities. To its credit, the New York Times recognized this, which is why they bought FiveThirtyEight.com and it now resides in their domain.

Silver has been catching a lot of heat over his model, which hasn’t had the president at less than a 75% of victory since June. This weekend, Silver wrote an excellent piece defending his work. From the column:

…we’ve about reached the point where if Mr. Romney wins, it can only be because the polls have been biased against him. Almost all of the chance that Mr. Romney has in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, about 16 percent to win the Electoral College, reflects this possibility.

Yes, of course: most of the arguments that the polls are necessarily biased against Mr. Romney reflect little more than wishful thinking.

Nevertheless, these arguments are potentially more intellectually coherent than the ones that propose that the leader in the race is “too close to call.” It isn’t. If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can’t acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public.

That’s some tough language, especially considering his employers are being more conservative in their analysis. It’s obvious that Silver believes in his predictive model, and that confidence is not unfounded, having predicted the outcome correctly in 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 election. If that election got him noticed, this election has gotten him scrutiny.

If all a person does is absorb the work of editorial writers, op-ed pieces, and bloviating cable pundits, Silver must look like he’s out of his mind. Or worse, that he’s little more than a paid operative of a biased liberal media. The only evidence of that, however, is how a reader reacts to his numbers, which is no evidence at all (in fact, the opposite argument could have been made in 2010, when Silver predicted, and was correct about, massive losses for the Democrats in the House).

Silver has a lot on the line with tomorrow’s outcome. Along with watching the returns tomorrow, I’ll be watching to see how they line up with Silver’s predictions. What I’m watching for is not so much a win for Silver, but a loss for punditry. There’s so much poison on the airwaves, in print and online masquerading as truth that getting skewered by some objective analysis is sorely needed. Well-considered opinion has a place in the public debate, but faulty predictions of outcomes based on little to no evidence and biased to a speaker’s agenda, whether it be political or monetary, needs a countervailing force. That’s what Silver provides, and why I imagine he will be quite satisfied come tomorrow night, even if Romney manages to beat the odds.

via Mitt Romney

Forget Rasmussen or Gallup. If you really wish to know how the public feels about the candidates for president, just let Google’s autofill feature drop some knowledge. Below are real screen grabs. All I did was type ‘[this person] is a’ and let Google and its database of popular search queries do the rest. My takeaway? People have issues. Also, the president is a brony.