2012 US Presidential Race Catch All

Nevin73 wrote:

The strong worry between my wife and I is that some nutjob, dissatisfied with the election, will make an attempt on President Obama's life. Reading the hate on facebook (and other places) it isn't hard to imagine someone making the attempt.

Apparently there have been a number of sincere plots over the last few years. This is not terribly surprising as that sort of thing happens with pretty much all administrations. That said, I suspect that there is a measurable difference in scale with this one.

In any event, my buddy loves sicking his titanium toothed Malinois on fence jumpers and his dog loves biting the living crap out of them.

Paleocon wrote:

This is particularly good, truthful and, as a result, to some uncomfortable.

It was let down a bit by his attempt at humour.

Nevin73 wrote:

The strong worry between my wife and I is that some nutjob, dissatisfied with the election, will make an attempt on President Obama's life. Reading the hate on facebook (and other places) it isn't hard to imagine someone making the attempt.

Everyone had the same worries 4 years ago.

The level of demonisation of Democrats alarms me. It's at the intensity you would expect for enemy troops during a war or for an ethnic group just before something horrible happens.

I remember a friend who went to Germany with her mother a few years ago to attend a family celebration. Her mother was looking a little perplexed and at one stage said, about the Germans there, "they are just like ordinary people." It's mind boggling but it feels like a lot of people in the US would have the same disconnect if they met a group of democrats.

This Facebook-shared photo is so ridiculous it makes me wonder if some of my family members are not just misinformed, but outright stupid.

IMAGE(http://www.ijreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/013.jpeg)

Quintin_Stone wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:

The strong worry between my wife and I is that some nutjob, dissatisfied with the election, will make an attempt on President Obama's life. Reading the hate on facebook (and other places) it isn't hard to imagine someone making the attempt.

Everyone had the same worries 4 years ago.

And 4 years before that, and 4 years before that....

I was going to say that I saw a lot of Dems also pulling their hair out in 2000 and 2004, claiming Bush stole the election, we were on our way to fascism, etc. But honestly there's been a boatload of crazy coming from conservatives that make me incredibly sad as an American. So for what it's worth I'd like to apologize for Nugents rant about obese minorities or Trumps call for armed revolt.

Nate Silver's analysis of the polls

Ouch Gallup--less accurate than Rasmussen, and lousy for the third election in a row?

CannibalCrowley wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:

The strong worry between my wife and I is that some nutjob, dissatisfied with the election, will make an attempt on President Obama's life. Reading the hate on facebook (and other places) it isn't hard to imagine someone making the attempt.

Everyone had the same worries 4 years ago.

And 4 years before that, and 4 years before that....

I was a lot more worried about Obama being assassinated four years ago than I was about Bush Jr in either of those elections (and at the time I supported Bush and didn't support Obama). This country be racist yo.

Yonder wrote:
CannibalCrowley wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:

The strong worry between my wife and I is that some nutjob, dissatisfied with the election, will make an attempt on President Obama's life. Reading the hate on facebook (and other places) it isn't hard to imagine someone making the attempt.

Everyone had the same worries 4 years ago.

And 4 years before that, and 4 years before that....

I was a lot more worried about Obama being assassinated four years ago than I was about Bush Jr in either of those elections (and at the time I supported Bush and didn't support Obama). This country be racist yo.

I think part of that is that the Left Wing in this country tends to express their frustration by announcing that they will pack up their bags and move to someplace more politically hospitable. There are a few outliers that say violent crap, but the vast majority of even the loudmouths tend to say crap like "okay, that's it. I'm moving to Canada."

In sharp contrast, Right Wing loudmouths tend to say crap like "we need blood in the streets" or "go get my gun". And to drive that point home, they actually tend to have a lot of guns and live in areas where they have ready access to ammonium nitrate.

I was going to say that I saw a lot of Dems also pulling their hair out in 2000 and 2004, claiming Bush stole the election, we were on our way to fascism, etc.

And we moved a long, long, LONG way toward it. Mass surveillance, indefinite detention, torture, assassination -- all things that were highly illegal for the government to do, before Bush was elected.

Malor wrote:

And we moved a long, long, LONG way toward it. Mass surveillance, indefinite detention, torture, assassination -- all things that were highly illegal for the government to do, before Bush was elected.

Is there some kind of script running on the site that after x number of posts we get subjected to this again?

When you scorn people for fearing a police state, that's what you should expect -- evidence that, for many segments of our society, we're already in one.

Just ask Occupy Wall Street.

Malor wrote:

When you scorn people for fearing a police state, that's what you should expect -- evidence that, for many segments of our society, we're already in one.

Just ask Occupy Wall Street.

I didnt scorn you for fearing a police state. I scorned your post for being repetitive and in every thread it seems. Seriously it's almost drink game worthy. Not only is there a thread specific just for this topic, the fact that you're actually wrong about half the stuff you say in this regard just adds to the comedy.

ranalin wrote:

Seriously it's almost drink game worthy.

I would love to see a GWJ drinking game.

So now Rick Scott plans on investigating why it took so long for people in FL to vote....

Seriously, this could be a Scooby Doo episode.

JC wrote:

So now Rick Scott plans on investigating why it took so long for people in FL to vote....

Seriously, this could be a Scooby Doo episode.

Yeah saw that on the local news last night. I think it was one of the mayors, maybe Tampa, that said any county with over 250k population should get a full 14 days of early voting. And it's like yeah, we had that in 2008 and there weren't any problems. Gov. Scott took it down to 8 this year, even though more people want to do early voting, and we had this awesome clusterf*ck, all in the hopes of keeping Obama's turnout low. They even showed clips from The Daily Show's Wed. episode where they laughed at Florida quite a bit.

If I'm still living here in 2014 it will be a pleasure to get him out of office. :p

Every damn election night what bothers me about the coverage is that while they tell us the numbers, those mean almost nothing. The whole point of the night is to find out who won and lost and let's be honest, you only need to tell us that once it's over. If they wanted to be journalists, they'd break down every damn EXIT POLL and talk about that instead so that we have some understanding about the race.

TL;DR does anybody have a link to comprehensive exit polling data?

I thought the exit poll numbers were what they based the reporting on? There are several companies that do exit polling, and all the news outlets contract one or more of them for different areas of the country. There's more coverage in swing states and contested races, but the reporting is based on exit polling until the departments of state begin to report. Then it's a combination, and eventually it shifts over to the actual results.

Yeah most of them "calling" states was based on exit polling. Especially the west coast states that all got called at 11pm eastern. Then the race itself was called at 11:10 when they called Ohio, based on exit polls and a mix of real numbers, maybe 70% were reported at that point?

There were enough real numbers in from the rural parts, and enough outstanding votes from the cities that there was no mathematical way Romney could make up the difference in Ohio, therefore the race was called. Of course it took another half hour to an hour for FOX News to believe it, and Romney to concede.

Robear wrote:

There are several companies that do exit polling, and all the news outlets contract one or more of them for different areas of the country.

Good to know, what I mean is that exit polling tells why people voted the way they did plus their demographic information and political ideology. Ya know, the important bit. Just saying, now it's Obama, now it's Romney, now Obama has a big lead, now Romney's pulling up alongside, it's going to be a photo finish! That's just a horse race, just entertainment, not journalism (although it does qualify as news).

I think that's more simply the effect of time zones. If the polls all closed at the same actual time - say 2000 San Francisco time - the coverage would be very different.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Nate Silver's analysis of the polls

Ouch Gallup--less accurate than Rasmussen, and lousy for the third election in a row?

Yeah, I heard an interview on NPR with one of the Gallup guys. The interviewer mentioned how people were saying Nate Silver got it right and Gallup got it wrong. Gallup guy suggested that all the polling companies were going to just get out of the polling business and go into the poll aggregating business then there wouldn't be any polls to aggregate anymore. He sounded pretty butthurt about the whole thing.

Well, he has a point. All Nate Silver is doing is taking the historical accuracy of different polls and their methods, and cranking out a prediction. But he's not actually creating the data he is using. His model works because he can correlate the results of lots of different polls, which he does because any one polls is not going to be broad enough to have the same accuracy.

What he's doing is actually pretty simple. I have no idea why anyone in the press was skeptical. Certain pundits had reason to confim their own bias, so I can see them blowing off his predictions.

At some point, though, his predictions are going to start affecting results.

Jayhawker wrote:

Well, he has a point. All Nate Silver is doing is taking the historical accuracy of different polls and their methods, and cranking out a prediction. But he's not actually creating the data he is using. His model works because he can correlate the results of lots of different polls, which he does because any one polls is not going to be broad enough to have the same accuracy.

What he's doing is actually pretty simple. I have no idea why anyone in the press was skeptical. Certain pundits had reason to confim their own bias, so I can see them blowing off his predictions.

At some point, though, his predictions are going to start affecting results.

Time to invent Psychohistory!

These polling companies need to update their EULAs or else the mod scene is going to kill them.

CheezePavilion wrote:

These polling companies need to update their EULAs or else the mod scene is going to slaughter them.

MTFY

Jayhawker wrote:

I have no idea why anyone in the press was skeptical.

Math clearly has a liberal bias, which is why I'm supporting a constitutional amendment to redefine pi as exactly 3, just like God intended.

I wish someone would do the same thing with news. Wait... Maybe there's a reason Fox isn't known for it's fact-checking...

Any person stepping into an established arena of information sources and actually comparing them against reality is bound to catch hell, from both the incompetents and the purposefully misleading. Even the partisans are starting to question their sources. Another approach to propaganda and the echo chamber will be needed if all this fact-checking and reality-based reporting actually take hold.

So apparently Papa John's CEO is cutting his workers' pay and hours because of Obamacare. The $0.14 or so that the new regulations would add to the cost of a pizza is apparently way too much. Is this for real? He's a massive asshole if it is.