Little Data

As we move into the final days of the 2016 election cycle, the smart money is on the campaigns — like Mrs. Clinton’s — that are leveraging the power of data to find every last vote they can.

Economists Against Trump

No One Cares What Economists Say About Trump

This week, there have been not one, but two open letters by some of the most eminent economists in the U.S., urging the American public not to vote for Donald Trump. One letter, published in the Wall Street Journal, was signed by 370 economists, including eight Nobel prize winners. It slams Trump for questioning the accuracy of economic data, for attacking free trade and immigration, for getting facts wrong and for having misguided policy proposals on a variety of fronts. The second letter is by Nobel laureates only -- 19 of them. They write:

Donald Trump…offers an incoherent economic agenda. His reckless threats to start trade wars with several of our largest trading partners, his plan to deport millions of immigrants, his trillions of dollars of unfunded tax cuts, his casual suggestion that the United States could threaten default on its debt in order to renegotiate with our creditors as if Treasuries were a junk bond—each of these proposals could jeopardize the foundations of American prosperity and the global economy.

economists lost respect when they failed to foresee the financial crisis. This is true -- almost no popular academic models of recessions even admitted the possibility of something like 2008 happening.

The FBI Is A Mindless, Unthinking White Male Club

The FBI Wants to Make America Great Again

the extraordinary Wall Street Journal coverage this week that revealed frustrations in the bureau over alleged Justice Department pressure to slow-walk an investigation into the Clinton Foundation. ..... The cherry on this banana-republic split is a tweet published Monday from a long-dormant Twitter account called @FBIRecordsVault. It disclosed that new records of the bureau’s probe into Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich had been released because of a Freedom of Information Act request. ..... “The Marc Rich tweet is evidence of open warfare between the Justice Department and the FBI.” ...... The move certainly appeared political. After all, former Attorney General Eric Holder was one of the first former officials to criticize Comey’s decision to update Congress on the e-mail investigation. ....... Perhaps the tweet was a shot across the bow to Holder, who recommended the Rich pardon in 2000 as deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton. ..... many rank-and-file FBI officials are frustrated about the investigation into the Clinton Foundation and the way the e-mail probe was handled ..... As he announced his decision to close the investigation, he also excoriated Clinton, calling her decision to use a private e-mail server for official business reckless and speculating that foreign powers accessed her e-mails (although he said the bureau could not prove that). Comey then promised Congress he would keep them abreast of new developments. He did just that less than two weeks before the election. ....... Through leaks and tweets, people in his bureau appear to be helping Donald Trump -- a man who has called for Clinton to be jailed. Ironic that Trump is the one who keeps saying the election will be rigged.

Yes, it does law enforcement. But the number one thing it does is it protects white male sexism. This naked attempt to influence the election is outrageous. The FBI is guilty of sexism, racism, and classism.

Comey is doing to Hillary what Mitch McConnell has been doing to Barack Obama. The office you hold does not matter, what matters is the color of your skin, and your gender. Otherwise Comey's boss is a black woman, and the guy is in open defiance. This is outrageous.

Priyanka Chopra And American Racism

America is a fundamentally racist country. America is as much into mindless, unthinking racism as people generally were into mindless assaults 2,000 years ago.

Hollywood is the most racist place in America with the possible exception of the US Senate.

You get to see some of that when Priyanka Chopra gets interviewed on American TV.

So Ellen. She is gay and female and small. And so she is the make you feel good person. If you can tolerate Ellen then you have proven you are a really really tolerant person. Hillary picked Ellen as the first show after the debates. Because Ellen is gay and female and small.

But Ellen has to ask Priyanka Chopra, "Do they drink over there in India?"

Some of the most famous Bollywood songs are around drinks. There is an entire genre of songs - ghazals - that revolve entirely around drinks. Not saying that drinking is essential and wonderful and when you drink you have really arrived or anything like that. But do they drink anywhere in the world?

The point is, if you have to ask, do they drink in India, you are about to ask, do you ride elephants to school? I rode an elephant once, but not to school, and I did not even grow up in India, I grew up an Indian in Nepal: my kind are still waging a civil rights movement for basic rights for being Indian.

Do you ride elephants to school? That actually was a question Priyanka Chopra was asked when she attended high school for a few years in Flushing, Queens, of all places.

But Ellen is a candlelight compared to a dumb white guy who shall remain nameless because I really don't know his name. He goes ahead and calls Priyanka Chopra "Miss Piggy Chops, because you eat like a pig, all the time, and your last name is Chops." On live television. Prime time television.

I was dumbstruck. If Indians were into things like jihad they would call a jihad on that dumb white ass, if you have any idea how popular Priyanka Chopra is in India.

She is Bollywood royalty.

But then this is a country where 40% of the people have felt the urge to delegitimize the first black president and the Senate Majority Leader would rather burn the US constitution for good rather than let the president appoint a judge like that document says.

But it is also a country where the top paid actor right now is a black guy. Opposite whom Priyanka Chopra is starring in a movie.

She came, she saw, she conquered even as the dumb white guys of the world stayed busy asking their dumb questions, like, can I call you Miss Piggy Chops?

She has the Body Mass Index of someone who has not destroyed half her gut bacteria.

Racism is a lot of people's idea of an ice breaker. I am going to say something racist and you are going to act like you are okay with it, then I am going to be nice to you about other things. Because I need to get the big picture right first.

But if you don't put up with that first racist comment they are utterly lost, like you had suddenly dropped them in the jungles of Burma without so much as a map.

FBI Institutional Hatred Of Clintons: Why?

FBI releases docs from 2001 Marc Rich probe days before election - CNNPolitics.com

By now this has become bizarre. The top law enforcement institution in the country is expressing open hatred for a particular last name in a naked attempt to influence a presidential election and is succeeding at it. Hillary is getting hammered at the polls with this FBI antic. What explains this bizarre behavior?

This is a naked attempt to give the election to Trump. This is a naked attempt to hijack an election.

Is the idea of the first female president so abhorrent?

Comey seems to think it is a sure shot. Either Hillary loses or she wins and is illegitimate from day one.

Lucifer himself is working extra time on this.

This is not just sexism. The idea of nakedly playing foul. This is also racism. The black woman boss will not be obeyed. This is also classism. Bill Clinton never had class to be president. Before him even Democratic presidents came from dynasties.

It is amazing how desperately America wants to be a Third World country.

Hillary’s Male Tormentors

Obama Criticizes F.B.I. Director: ‘We Don’t Operate on Leaks’

Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel’s Fantasy Trump

Burr Reveals

the GOP nominee "aligns perfectly with where the Republican Party is" on the issues. 

James Carville Is An American Original

He gets it.

American democracy is safe as long as James Carville is around.

Comey's Trumpism

James Comey, the formerly respected FBI director whose maladroit handling of a fresh email “discovery” threatens to change American history. A few weeks ago, I wrote that the rise of Trump is a sign that the Constitution is “gravely, perhaps terminally, ill.” I underestimated how far the rot has spread and how hard it will be to cure.  A constitution is not simply a collection of words, or even a set of rules; it is a complex focus of text, history, values, and institutions. And as the nation forsakes the values and devalues the history, the institutions—for all their marble majesty—are hollowing out. The Comey episode is but the latest symptom of a seriously ailing civic culture.

He defied Department of Justice tradition and policy, and the advice of Department of Justice staff, to boldly tell the nation . . . essentially nothing except, “Everybody freak out!” In so doing, he has left not only his own reputation but the organization he heads sadly diminished for some time to come.

The email announcement—now denounced by, among others, Democratic and Republican attorneys general, the ethics counsel for the Bush White House, and Fox News’s Judge Jeanine—seems not to have been a partisan maneuver so much as an extraordinary lapse in judgment 

a chilling reminder of how many such pillars of the republic have been buckling lately.

Consider that Donald J. Trump, a man incapable of a coherent English sentence, now has a lease (with option to buy) on the Republican Party. The United States Congress—where the Northwest Ordinance, the Homestead Act, The Fourteenth Amendment, the Social Security Act of 1935, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were drafted—now spends its time happily threatening to default on the national debt and refusing to confirm judges.

The Supreme Court—once vaunted as the branch that worked, is now literally hollowed out, its one missing justice having robbed it of not only its ability to decide cases but its very confidence in itself. A new step downward is now being pledged, as Senators like John McCain and Ted Cruz begin to suggest that Court vacancies should never be filled. (“[L]et the Supreme Court die out,” one conservative commentator suggested last week.)

State governments—once the supposed “laboratories of democracy”—are hollowing out too, degenerating into semi-democratic one-party satrapies (look at Kansas, North Carolina, and Wisconsin).

even the elected state courts are increasingly under the sway of unregulated money.

The institutional media is now a shadow of itself. In the rise of Trump, cable news was an eager collaborator. 

The FBI’s Halloween trick was not intended light-heartedly, and it may be a harbinger of the same.

Trump’s Russian Connection

an alleged covert communication channel between the Trump Organization, Trump’s business fiefdom, and Alfa Bank, a Russian institution with ties to the Russian oligarchy and Putin. 

 a former senior spy for a Western country had uncovered evidence that the Kremlin had launched an operation—approved by Putin—to turn Trump into a Russian asset. 

 “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance.” It maintained that Trump "and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals." It claimed that Russian intelligence had "compromised" Trump during his visits to Moscow and could "blackmail him." 

Alt Right International

When the USSR represented an authoritarian version of the left, he was a leftist; when the party line of the successor Russian state changed to right-wing authoritarianism, he obediently tacked right—a circumstance which shows that “left” and “right” are often arbitrary categories, particularly when considering the fringes.

Marine Le Pen’s National Front requested a 27-million euro loan from Russia, according to the party’s own treasurer. Nigel Farage, the former UK Independence Party leader and Brexit engineer, has appeared on RT, the Russian government-subsidized media empire (it spends more on foreign broadcasting than any other entity except the BBC). 

Throughout the Cold War, Moscow subsidized the leftist fringe in Western Europe. Now it does the same with right-wing parties there—same tactics, different ideological players.

 a curious phenomenon: The resurgent far-right parties in numerous Western countries, which harp incessantly on the sovereignty, independence, and world-historical uniqueness of whichever country they happen to live in, have self-organized into a transnational alt-right “comintern” that appears to be more effective than the leftist comintern of the Soviet era.

Washington has made numerous preventable errors as the result of sacrificing a stable long-term relationship with Russia on the altar either of domestic electoral expedience or empire-building by the NATO bureaucracy. 

Putin may not fully realize just how much he has raised the geopolitical stakes in the growing Cold War 2.0 between the U.S. and Russia by taking sides in the most polarized domestic election since the Civil War.