Who, exactly, says "we don't know if Clinton made any mistakes in 2016," or that Clinton didn't make any mistakes in 2016, or that nobody talked about Clinton's mistakes? I heard plenty of griping about mistakes Clinton made in 2016. I griped about some of them myself. All campaigns make mistakes, though nobody talks about them if you win, only if you lose. But what with everything else that was going on in 2016-- Comey, e-mails, Russia, etc. -- ordinary discussion of ordinary mistakes stuck out less. There's only so much oxygen, and the really weird stuff took up a lot of what would ordinarily go to the losing candidate's mistakes.
That main thing that *I* would, personally, worry about is being able to figure out whether Clinton made any mistakes with the states in question and, if so, avoid them.
If, of course, she didn’t make any mistakes and it’s sexist to imply she did, I’d wonder if we weren’t lying to ourselves.
You can, personally, worry about anything that floats your boat or confirms your priors. Any 2016 Hillary mistakes that an amateur can figure out have probably already been factored into the 2020 campaign plans. And the professionals would be fools to talk about that for public consumption. This time around, the candidate will make his own mistakes, not repeat hers.
How about state-by-state polling? From a recent L.A. Times piece, behind a paywall:
Biden polls ahead of Clinton’s electoral margin in each of the 26 states for which polls are available, except for New Mexico, New York, and California, which are all blue enough that his relative performance wouldn’t cost any electoral votes. Meanwhile, Sanders polls worse than Clinton’s electoral performance in four states, including a disadvantage in Delaware large enough to put the state in play for Trump.
Particularly crucial are states that swing to Republicans (in the lower-right) and states that swing to Democrats (in the upper-left). Both of the leading Democrats left in the race are projected to win all of the states that Clinton captured in 2016.
Current polling suggests that Biden is expected to flip eight states blue (Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, and Arizona) and Sanders would flip six (Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Florida).
To determine the expected electoral college votes for each candidate, we use reported poll means and standard deviations to determine the probability that each candidate would win the state’s electoral votes based on that poll. We then calculated the average likelihood that each candidate would win a given state, weighting by the number of days since the start of 2019 (in order to give recent polls more importance). Having calculated the expected probability of winning each state, we determined the expected number of electoral votes a candidate would receive from each state with polling data. (Since all of the states without polling data are considered either safely Republican or safely Democrat, we assume that their electoral votes will go to the party that won the state in 2016.)
matters “settled” incorrectly by the Court rarely stay settled in the rest of the public sphere.
Are you sure about this? Or does it apply only to cases you've actually heard of and have an opinion about? Just off the top of my head, here's a sample of settled matters that may very well have been settled wrong without much public outcry:
1. When does jeopardy attach in a criminal prosecution? The settled rule is that in a jury trial it is when the jury is sworn and in a bench trial when the first witness testifies. There is a body of scholarship that thinks this is wrong.
2. Is a lawsuit brought by a natural person who is a citizen of state A against a corporation incorporated and having its principal place of business in state B within the diversity-of-citizenship jurisdiction of the federal courts? Some recent scholarship says no.
3. Does the Eleventh Amendment bar suits by a citizen of state A against state A? This has been the law for well over a hundred years, yet some scholars have never accepted it as correct.
As to your larger point, the Constitution does not contain or come with an instruction manual on how to interpret it, so saying that stare decisis is not found in the Constitution doesn't say anything useful.
1. We are alone.
2. We're not alone, but we'll never be able to know.
3. We're not alone, we'll find some good evidence that we're not alone, but there will be no way to communicate with whoever is out there.
For 90% of Republican voters, there is nothing to understand. They are Republicans and voted for Trump because he was the Republican nominee. They will do it again, somewhat handicapped by a modest number of Republicans who just can't bring themselves to do it again. As for the rest, I grew up among people who became Trump voters. They have always liked people like Trump and always will. How, exactly, you describe the reasons they like people like Trump depends on whether you, yourself, approve of those reasons, and nothing is to be gained at this point by interviewing random diner patrons every four years.
The enthusiasm gap is overrated. An enthusiastic voter's vote counts for exactly as much as a "he'll do" voter's vote. Enthusiasm matters only if it affects turnout. However meh the Dems feel about Biden, or whoever else is the eventual nominee, they are very enthusiastic about getting rid of Trump. For all the enthusiasm I see at Trump rallies, I see no evidence that this isn't just the same folks who voted for him in 2016. Unless there is a bunch of Trump enthusiasts who, for some reason, didn't come out and vote for him in 2016, enthusiasm just makes votes louder, not more numerous.
I'm not asking you to switch to my view. I'm pointing out that you made a positive declaration of fact about what was happening and what would happen that was wrong.
You can have all the suspicions you want, and there were reasons to be suspicious (not especially persuasive, but reasons) but -- unless Barr is lying -- there is video proof that no one entered Epstein's cell in the window needed to kill him. Pathologists can disagree all they want about the significance of hyloid bone fractures, but even if the type of fracture is more common in chokings than in hangings, nobody choked Epstein. As for the rest of it, yes, these things do happen all the time, sad as that is, and that is why we are never likely to get answers to why what happens all the time happened this time.
You can have all the suspicions you want, especially those that confirm your priors. I'll rest on how things actually turned out.
I remember Farrow and Weinstein. I remember that very big, highly-publicized article published in the MSM New Yorker. Lots of people read it.
I also remember a kerfuffle about whether the story he had developed for NBC was as well-sourced as the one later published in the New Yorker. I don't recall anyone coming forward with anything that would help anyone on the outside determine who was right in that pissing contest. That would be moderately interesting.
That's a different question. You were the one who set the terms of the discussion by asserting that no one was looking into Epstein's death. I asked how you knew. You didn't. You were wrong about that, as all the MSM stuff you so dutifully posted about what MSM folk were looking into and found about Epstein's death showed.
If you want to argue about whether, before we knew how things would turn out, there was some reason to believe that someone who did look into Epstein's death might get a story spiked, anyone who finds that subject interesting is welcome to discuss it. I'm content to rest on how things turned out.
There was reason to be "suspicious." But suspicions are a dime a dozen. What there wasn't reason for was the assumption that no one was looking into things. They were, and they found out a lot. They found out that Epstein didn't kill himself. Does anyone know why one of the cameras was on the fritz? Probably not. If someone tampered with it, he got away with it and there's no reasonable investigative path to finding out who did it or why. Since footage from the other camera (our plotter was clumsy, wasn't he?) was recovered that eventually showed -- unless Barr is lying -- that no one entered Epstein's cell between the last time he was seen alive and the first time he was seen dead, we now know what the cameras were put up to show us, and probably nobody cares about the other camera. Except if it's the linchpin to a theory that someone wanted Epstein killed and tried to set it up, but Epstein killed himself before the plan could be put into effect. Such a plot is by no means inconceivable, but there's no reason to believe it and no discernible route to uncovering it if it were true.
And there is, apparently, nothing that could collaborate anything fishy about anything of the above.
There's plenty that could, in theory, "collaborate" it, but after a bunch of serious reporting -- which you had confidently said wasn't going on, even while giving us a running account of it -- it hasn't surfaced, and some of it has been debunked. The "cameras on the fritz," not reported by the MSM except as a rumor, turned out not to be true, since it was footage from at least one of the cameras that showed that no one had entered Epstein's cell between the last time he was seen alive and the first time he was seen dead. Now maybe Bill Barr, who says he saw the footage, is lying. Is someone looking into that? I don't know, but I'm not going to go off half-cocked and say, positively, that nothing is being done to find out just because we don't have answers to questions it is hard to answer RIGHT NOW.
I was tempted to predict that you would employ, yet again, the Jaybird Backtrack to Banality (TM), but I figured everybody already knew it was coming.
Just for fun, though, I'll predict that the next move will be the: "I didn't backtrack; I never said anything significant in the first place," though that risks self-refuting prophecy.
No, it isn't, because that stories get "spiked" is indisputable. Nobody has ever said they don't. What matters is why they're spiked, because sometimes they ought to be. I've listened to what he had to say and don't know anything I didn't know before -- at least about anything that matters.
As I remember the usage in my own newspaper days, a story could be "spiked" either because it was embarrassing to the powers that be or that it was not solid enough to run with. These were not watertight compartments. Higher ups might demand better sourcing of a story that would embarrass the powers that be than they would in a similar story that would embarrass a nobody for obvious reasons.Who wants Harvey Weinstein's or Jeffrey Epstein's lawyers up your ass unless you've got the goods nailed down tight? It's not always clear whether a spike was a righteous spike or not, even when the basic facts are known, and pissing contests between reporters and higher-ups don't do much more than confirm whatever priors you bring to the discussion. At least until somebody does solid reporting on the reporting. But that's hard work. For the rest of us, there's an empty barstool down that way.
He should perform on a double bill with the vanity band of James Dolan, heir to the Cablevision/Madison Square Garden fortune and bane of all Knicks fans.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Nobody Owes Elizabeth Warren a Thing”
Who, exactly, says "we don't know if Clinton made any mistakes in 2016," or that Clinton didn't make any mistakes in 2016, or that nobody talked about Clinton's mistakes? I heard plenty of griping about mistakes Clinton made in 2016. I griped about some of them myself. All campaigns make mistakes, though nobody talks about them if you win, only if you lose. But what with everything else that was going on in 2016-- Comey, e-mails, Russia, etc. -- ordinary discussion of ordinary mistakes stuck out less. There's only so much oxygen, and the really weird stuff took up a lot of what would ordinarily go to the losing candidate's mistakes.
"
That main thing that *I* would, personally, worry about is being able to figure out whether Clinton made any mistakes with the states in question and, if so, avoid them.
If, of course, she didn’t make any mistakes and it’s sexist to imply she did, I’d wonder if we weren’t lying to ourselves.
You can, personally, worry about anything that floats your boat or confirms your priors. Any 2016 Hillary mistakes that an amateur can figure out have probably already been factored into the 2020 campaign plans. And the professionals would be fools to talk about that for public consumption. This time around, the candidate will make his own mistakes, not repeat hers.
"
How about state-by-state polling? From a recent L.A. Times piece, behind a paywall:
Biden polls ahead of Clinton’s electoral margin in each of the 26 states for which polls are available, except for New Mexico, New York, and California, which are all blue enough that his relative performance wouldn’t cost any electoral votes. Meanwhile, Sanders polls worse than Clinton’s electoral performance in four states, including a disadvantage in Delaware large enough to put the state in play for Trump.
Particularly crucial are states that swing to Republicans (in the lower-right) and states that swing to Democrats (in the upper-left). Both of the leading Democrats left in the race are projected to win all of the states that Clinton captured in 2016.
Current polling suggests that Biden is expected to flip eight states blue (Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, and Arizona) and Sanders would flip six (Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Florida).
To determine the expected electoral college votes for each candidate, we use reported poll means and standard deviations to determine the probability that each candidate would win the state’s electoral votes based on that poll. We then calculated the average likelihood that each candidate would win a given state, weighting by the number of days since the start of 2019 (in order to give recent polls more importance). Having calculated the expected probability of winning each state, we determined the expected number of electoral votes a candidate would receive from each state with polling data. (Since all of the states without polling data are considered either safely Republican or safely Democrat, we assume that their electoral votes will go to the party that won the state in 2016.)
On “Wednesday Writs: Kimble v. Marvel”
matters “settled” incorrectly by the Court rarely stay settled in the rest of the public sphere.
Are you sure about this? Or does it apply only to cases you've actually heard of and have an opinion about? Just off the top of my head, here's a sample of settled matters that may very well have been settled wrong without much public outcry:
1. When does jeopardy attach in a criminal prosecution? The settled rule is that in a jury trial it is when the jury is sworn and in a bench trial when the first witness testifies. There is a body of scholarship that thinks this is wrong.
2. Is a lawsuit brought by a natural person who is a citizen of state A against a corporation incorporated and having its principal place of business in state B within the diversity-of-citizenship jurisdiction of the federal courts? Some recent scholarship says no.
3. Does the Eleventh Amendment bar suits by a citizen of state A against state A? This has been the law for well over a hundred years, yet some scholars have never accepted it as correct.
As to your larger point, the Constitution does not contain or come with an instruction manual on how to interpret it, so saying that stare decisis is not found in the Constitution doesn't say anything useful.
On “Thursday Throughput: Are We Alone Edition?”
Three possibilities:
1. We are alone.
2. We're not alone, but we'll never be able to know.
3. We're not alone, we'll find some good evidence that we're not alone, but there will be no way to communicate with whoever is out there.
I'm not sure which is more depressing.
On “Wednesday Writs: Kimble v. Marvel”
To settle things. As Justice Brandeis once observed, it is often more important that a question be settled than that it be settled right.
On “About Last Night, Super Tuesday Edition: Everybody Duck The Swinging Narrative”
For 90% of Republican voters, there is nothing to understand. They are Republicans and voted for Trump because he was the Republican nominee. They will do it again, somewhat handicapped by a modest number of Republicans who just can't bring themselves to do it again. As for the rest, I grew up among people who became Trump voters. They have always liked people like Trump and always will. How, exactly, you describe the reasons they like people like Trump depends on whether you, yourself, approve of those reasons, and nothing is to be gained at this point by interviewing random diner patrons every four years.
On “Super Tuesday Open Thread”
No. We can't. And you and everyone else knows why.
"
The enthusiasm gap is overrated. An enthusiastic voter's vote counts for exactly as much as a "he'll do" voter's vote. Enthusiasm matters only if it affects turnout. However meh the Dems feel about Biden, or whoever else is the eventual nominee, they are very enthusiastic about getting rid of Trump. For all the enthusiasm I see at Trump rallies, I see no evidence that this isn't just the same folks who voted for him in 2016. Unless there is a bunch of Trump enthusiasts who, for some reason, didn't come out and vote for him in 2016, enthusiasm just makes votes louder, not more numerous.
"
True, but goofy uncle Joe would still be a relief from deranged barstool blowhard Donald.
"
Like Jaybird, I thought Biden/Harris made a great deal of sense early on. It still does.
On “They Don’t Have a Clue”
At least we know, or think we know, that Mr. Boddy didn't kill himself.
On “Epstein Dead”
Reading comprehension problems still not solved?
"
I'm not asking you to switch to my view. I'm pointing out that you made a positive declaration of fact about what was happening and what would happen that was wrong.
You can have all the suspicions you want, and there were reasons to be suspicious (not especially persuasive, but reasons) but -- unless Barr is lying -- there is video proof that no one entered Epstein's cell in the window needed to kill him. Pathologists can disagree all they want about the significance of hyloid bone fractures, but even if the type of fracture is more common in chokings than in hangings, nobody choked Epstein. As for the rest of it, yes, these things do happen all the time, sad as that is, and that is why we are never likely to get answers to why what happens all the time happened this time.
You can have all the suspicions you want, especially those that confirm your priors. I'll rest on how things actually turned out.
"
I remember Farrow and Weinstein. I remember that very big, highly-publicized article published in the MSM New Yorker. Lots of people read it.
I also remember a kerfuffle about whether the story he had developed for NBC was as well-sourced as the one later published in the New Yorker. I don't recall anyone coming forward with anything that would help anyone on the outside determine who was right in that pissing contest. That would be moderately interesting.
"
That's a different question. You were the one who set the terms of the discussion by asserting that no one was looking into Epstein's death. I asked how you knew. You didn't. You were wrong about that, as all the MSM stuff you so dutifully posted about what MSM folk were looking into and found about Epstein's death showed.
If you want to argue about whether, before we knew how things would turn out, there was some reason to believe that someone who did look into Epstein's death might get a story spiked, anyone who finds that subject interesting is welcome to discuss it. I'm content to rest on how things turned out.
"
There was reason to be "suspicious." But suspicions are a dime a dozen. What there wasn't reason for was the assumption that no one was looking into things. They were, and they found out a lot. They found out that Epstein didn't kill himself. Does anyone know why one of the cameras was on the fritz? Probably not. If someone tampered with it, he got away with it and there's no reasonable investigative path to finding out who did it or why. Since footage from the other camera (our plotter was clumsy, wasn't he?) was recovered that eventually showed -- unless Barr is lying -- that no one entered Epstein's cell between the last time he was seen alive and the first time he was seen dead, we now know what the cameras were put up to show us, and probably nobody cares about the other camera. Except if it's the linchpin to a theory that someone wanted Epstein killed and tried to set it up, but Epstein killed himself before the plan could be put into effect. Such a plot is by no means inconceivable, but there's no reason to believe it and no discernible route to uncovering it if it were true.
"
And there is, apparently, nothing that could collaborate anything fishy about anything of the above.
There's plenty that could, in theory, "collaborate" it, but after a bunch of serious reporting -- which you had confidently said wasn't going on, even while giving us a running account of it -- it hasn't surfaced, and some of it has been debunked. The "cameras on the fritz," not reported by the MSM except as a rumor, turned out not to be true, since it was footage from at least one of the cameras that showed that no one had entered Epstein's cell between the last time he was seen alive and the first time he was seen dead. Now maybe Bill Barr, who says he saw the footage, is lying. Is someone looking into that? I don't know, but I'm not going to go off half-cocked and say, positively, that nothing is being done to find out just because we don't have answers to questions it is hard to answer RIGHT NOW.
"
There's an empty barstool over there.
"
So I will repeat my earlier question: what would constitute evidence for stories getting spiked for you?
Details. But that's hard work.
"
I was tempted to predict that you would employ, yet again, the Jaybird Backtrack to Banality (TM), but I figured everybody already knew it was coming.
Just for fun, though, I'll predict that the next move will be the: "I didn't backtrack; I never said anything significant in the first place," though that risks self-refuting prophecy.
"
No, it isn't, because that stories get "spiked" is indisputable. Nobody has ever said they don't. What matters is why they're spiked, because sometimes they ought to be. I've listened to what he had to say and don't know anything I didn't know before -- at least about anything that matters.
"
It's hard to be responsible in the presence of a shiny object that confirms your priors.
"
As I remember the usage in my own newspaper days, a story could be "spiked" either because it was embarrassing to the powers that be or that it was not solid enough to run with. These were not watertight compartments. Higher ups might demand better sourcing of a story that would embarrass the powers that be than they would in a similar story that would embarrass a nobody for obvious reasons.Who wants Harvey Weinstein's or Jeffrey Epstein's lawyers up your ass unless you've got the goods nailed down tight? It's not always clear whether a spike was a righteous spike or not, even when the basic facts are known, and pissing contests between reporters and higher-ups don't do much more than confirm whatever priors you bring to the discussion. At least until somebody does solid reporting on the reporting. But that's hard work. For the rest of us, there's an empty barstool down that way.
On “Jay Sekulow’s Vanity Band”
He should perform on a double bill with the vanity band of James Dolan, heir to the Cablevision/Madison Square Garden fortune and bane of all Knicks fans.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.