Symmetry required it: 2012 american general election thread #2

house effects + also another huge thing is giving heavier weight to polls that have performed better in the past

also, iirc, weighing state polls + national polls differently. i think there's a lot of stuff like that. every now and then he mentions a different number in the mix

another thing i remember him talking about is weighing newer numbers over older numbers, but keeping older numbers in the mix, and discounting individual polls that fall way outside consensus

I remember that from 2008, a doppler effect, numbers fading as they recede into the past, not just disappearing.

it's funny that it took as long as it did some a nate silver figure to appear, I remember thinking bout how crappy poll-analysis was back in 2004. but in print, someone coulda been doing this in the 80s.

Romney already trying to work the State Dept. worker's death in Libya politically. Sick.

NEVER FORGET

well here we are

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/09/state-dept-confirms-death-in-libya-romney-attacks-disgraceful-white-house.php

sick

https://twitter.com/Reince/status/245733811747422208

I should probably go find some tin foil hat forum when I feel like this, but doesn't the whole situation seem kind of manufactured?

cameron:

But having been through every document – and every government document including Cabinet Minutes will be published - the Panel found no evidence of any government trying to conceal the truth.

At the time of the Taylor Report the then Prime Minister was briefed by her private secretary that the defensive and – I quote - “close to deceitful” behaviour of senior South Yorkshire officers was “depressingly familiar.”

so they didn't try and conceal the truth that the police were liars, they just didn't tell anyone and put it safely in secret government papers which have never been published.

duh wrong thread!

why the fuck are ppl protesting an embassy because some asshole posted something stupid on youtube? do they not get what youtube is?

That was my reaction. Although I'd say that once you move into gunfire and rpgs you're out of "protesting" territory.

Odyssey Dawn: a military operations in Libya thread.

why the fuck are ppl protesting an embassy because some asshole posted something stupid on youtube? do they not get what youtube is?

― Mordy, Wednesday, September 12, 2012 8:29 AM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

signs point to no

tho i need to look into whatever this 'movie' is. is it just some dude's channel or is it one of those things that everybody in the anti-islam crowd is bigging up

http://www.leaderpost.com/news/world/7228133.bin?size=620x400s
http://www.faceoff.com/7228133.bin?size=620x400

oh, it's terry jones. ffs.

looool

Not THAT Terry Jones, this one, for anyone who confuses the two: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/08/obama-effigy-hanged-outside-church_n_1581272.html

not a jew.

maybe we need a new thread for that, idk. of course it's political right away. fucking reince priebus, what a gross little shit

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/09/innocence-of-muslims-terry-jones-video-sparked-protests-libya-egypt.html

rare NY Post otm

http://www.nypost.com/rw/nypost/2012/09/12/covers/front091212.jpg

terry jones is hugely hugely famous across the muslim world. not exactly sure how that happened, but after his koran burning stunt he's the michael jackson of crusader devils over there. this isn't 'just a movie'

that said, the coordinated nature of this whole thing is freaking me out.

it's just a movie like terry jones burning the koran is just an idiot

so then how are there riots and assault on embassies happening?

it's a new mutant version of one of the most powerful underlying incentives for terrorism - the power that it affords non-state actors with few resources to draw attention to a cause. normally we think of that kind of action as a direct one, with some group going out and doing something violent. now with these internetz, globalization, etc, it's possible to make a profoundly ignorant video that no one even knows about in this country, publicize it, and use it to incite a reaction across the world. and there's a neverending well of stupidity. i'm not sure how you mitigate the risk, since you can't really stop stupid people from doing stupid things with internet videos and trying to provoke a reaction.

xposts, Just to be clear, it's not a Pastor Terry Jones production, he just jumped on the bandwagon.

Can't believe Muslims are upset over this video, you'd think we'd have been bombing them for ten years or something...

note that both jones and paranoid islamists have incentive to inflate jones' influence in the US

xp yeah that's true, but publicity by jones was responsible for making it well known in egypt:

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/obscure-film-mocking-muslim-prophet-sparks-anti-u-s-protests-in-egypt-and-libya/

I'm sure anti-US protests are going on all the time. If Libya was blowing shit up over here with drones i'd be protesting too.

I'm not totally shocked but, well, still shocked at how inaccurate, unhelpful and inappropriate Romney's response to the Libya mess has been. This guy is even tone-deaf when the mood calls for something simple like sympathy if not outright silence.

Jones is a scumbag, he keeps coming to Dearborn with his followers to harass Muslims.

Scott Galupo:

Before yesterday, I had assumed that the Romney campaign was perhaps mildly spooked by President Obama’s post-convention polling bounce, but nonetheless confident that the bounce would recede and that the race would return to the status quo ante September.

Now: not so much.

The Romney campaign’s reaction to the attacks on U.S. diplomatic missions in Egypt and Libya was, as Daniel Larison says, “hasty and stupid.”

I think Daniel is being charitable.

Think of it: On the eleventh anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, a day in which both campaigns have agreed to a political cease-fire on television, several U.S. foreign service workers are murdered by an angry mob. “Apparently unaware of the timing of the first embassy statement,” as the Times puts it, the Romney campaign crudely parlays the facts of the attacks — angry Muslims kill Americans — into a broader narrative about Obama’s supposed weakness on terrorism and “sympathy” for America’s enemies.

That’s more than hasty and stupid; that’s unconscionable.

I dunno if this is "panic" as much as its emblematic of the GOP's standard deep hypocrisy/cynicism

little from column a, little from column b

I think they just fucked up. I guess they were responding to a statement condemning this ridiculous video that was released before the murders, a failed attempt to calm people down. So of course the Republican line is that Obama was coddling or encouraging terrorists or whatever, but because they were impatient to break their negativity embargo they blurted prematurely. Which upped the asshole quotient of the Romney statement.

Patty Buch = stopped clock

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/has-obama-called-bibis-bluff/

x-post
And predictably, right-wing idiots like Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post webpage are defending Romney and pushing their standard cliches about Obama's foreign policy. Romney doesn't want to admit he made a mistake so he's gonna double-down on the nonsense.

I never read The American Conservative, do they normally make sense or do they just really, really hate Romney?

Romney kept up the attack in a speech today.

the american conservative is sort of the last vestige of what i'd call the palatable part of the old right. a lot of their columnists are the conservative foreign policy realists that lost the argument to the neoconservatives.

however, the old right as a whole makes my skin crawl (larison is no exception frankly). it's pat buchanan's magazine! grain of salt.

never read The American Conservative, do they normally make sense or do they just really, really hate Romney

On foreign policy, both. They love picking on Corner-ites too.

Well, I don't know if Brent Scowcroft and his ilk are represented in the magazine?

it's pat buchanan's magazine!

hahaha okay

grain of salt just turned into a full-fledged salt lick

I think it is really amazing that the modern Republican has become so crazy that Pat Buchanan seems to be a reasonable person in comparison

well it's a fine line between "america's fo-po should be modest, restrained, legal, and concerned with our interests" and "the white nation should not be the puppet of the international jew". so, caveat lector!

Amazed that noted Israel hater and anti-Semite Pat B. left out his standard nastyness and used some reasonable arguments

^^this!

I'm not a Larison fan but I've rarely if ever seen any of Buchanan's brontosaurus riffs on the perfidy of alien cultures. In fact, Larison rarely offers advice: he throws stones at Jonah types. Which is all I want from the likes of him.

he pretty much keeps his trap shut on domestic stuff too, except a few mentions of the 'unborn' here and there.