Hillary Clinton – Page 2 – The Accidental Rabbi

John-Danforth — Former US Sen. John Danforth, currently age 79, was a thoughtful Republican senator from Missouri. With his warm dignity and long career of treating political opponents with respect and civility, he could be part of a whole slew of GOP heavyweights banding together to discredit and eject Trump. Why isn’t that happening?

Here’s what’s pissing me off more than Trump’s racist & misogynistic demagoguery: the failure of other Republican leaders to step up strong, call him out, denounce him, and tell him he’s not welcome in their party. Today he fielded a question from a man who spewed anti-Muslim racist garbage, including claiming Obama to be a Muslim and not an American citizen (how original). Trump said nothing to contradict the man’s claims, and he treated the man’s eventual question, “will we ever be rid of them [Muslims]” like a normal question. His response meandered but more or less affirmed the man’s ideas.

120229_snowe_pic_605_reut — Former Sen. Olympia Snowe, (R – Maine), supposedly left politics because her party had moved too far right for her. She could be banding together with other Repubs who see Trump as a dangerous demagogue. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dick Lugar, Colin Powell, Condaleeza Rice,

Of course, this is only the latest episode in Trump’s media-grabbing use of shock-language, xenophobia, and hate. That someone like Trump could be doing what he’s doing right now is not terribly surprising. But what’s inexplicable and appalling is the overall lack of a clear and forceful condemnation of Trump’s destructive narcissistic fear-mongering by the rest of the Republican leadership, including the other Presidential candidates, current major office-holders, and retired respected GOP figures.

mitty — This guy could be standing firm against Trumpism and it would make a difference.

Yes, some of the other candidates have objected to things Trump has said, or have criticized him at times in strong terms. But that’s not enough. Not enough for a major American political party that carries some of the responsibility of upholding our most basic core American values.

ahnold — There’s no way the Guvernator is down with all of Trump’s mishugass. So come on, Ahnold… give him a piece of your mind!

I’m saying it out loud now: Republicans are making a huge mistake by not having collectively called out Trump’s many bigotries as completely unacceptable for our nation and for their party. What we should have been seeing in the past 8 weeks is a parade of high stature GOP leaders coming forward in every media format to take this guy down. There are 3 living Republican former Presidents who could do this. There’s Colin Powell and Condi Rice. There are retired Senators, like the well-respected Republican moderate, John Danforth, of my home state of Missouri, and John Sununu, and even The Guvernator! All of these folks, including all of the current GOP candidates for pres, should have huddled and then set forth on a clear, unequivocal rejection of Trump having a place in the party. The message would be “we’re conservative – perhaps even very conservative these days – but racist, sexist, and just plain arrogant and cruel comments are out of bounds for our party.”

He could be clear and loud denouncing Trump.

I don’t know how party rules work, but if it is possible for them to kick him out of the party, they should have, along with the full-blown denunciation and condemnation. Instead, the criticisms aimed at him are scattered, weak, and do not reach the level of stopping this dangerous demagogue from hijacking the party brand.
Continue reading “Rant Rant Rant Dammit Trump Hate-fest GOP Letting Him Go Too Far” →

From Sabermetrics to Nate Silver, the past decade has become the decade of probabilities as headlines. Serious baseball fans don’t just study the box scores in the paper anymore – they turn to Fangraphs and other websites to see how their analysts have projected probabilities of everything from a team making the post-season to winning the World Series. Each baseball site has its own proprietary analytical formula, which gets tweaked after each season to try to adjust for whatever the difference turned out to be between their projections and the final actual results.

And of course, Nate Silver, who got his start doing probabilities and projections on sports stats, applied the concepts to political polls and created a model that provided probabilities projections for the ’08 and ’12 national elections. Silver’s model’s projections the night before both elections was stunningly close to the actual results.

I follow national politics more closely than does me good (I get super anxious and neurotic about things in a way that isn’t really helping anyone or anything). I am someone who tends to form strong gut feelings about political trends, but I don’t think I have an accurate sense of how often my gut turns out to be right. Regardless of whether I have a very intuitive gut or whether I’m just proven right some of the time and tend to remember those times but not the others, I am, in the end, stuck with my gut feelings.

But something I’ve never done before is express my gut feelings in terms of probabilities. Previously, I’ve just said, “I think so-and-so’s going to win,” and then say why. But I’ve never said, “I think right now so-and-so has a 75% likelihood of winning,” so I thought I’d take a shot at doing that now. I’ll quantify my gut feeling probabilities as UGPs – unscientific gut-feeling probability.

Here goes nothing! Continue reading “Gut Feelings as Probabilities” →