A story about a pathetic man's downfall [34 Felony Convictions]

[lemonlime 5503]

In other news,

 

[Biff Tannen 45715]

19 minutes ago, Azbadlands said:

I'm just saying a lot of people like myself have moved own and "accepted" the results of the election but still have questions with no answers about all of the anomolies in the election that do not make sense

You have been lied to.  There were no anomalies.  

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

1 hour ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:

A man who got climate change/prescription drug prices/infrastructure/semiconductor research and invesment/veterans care/expanding NATO and rebuilding its trust in the United States/modest gun control  etc.... done?

Oh I’m glad he did some things and did not do treason, big thanks for that.  I could snap back here with everything he hasn’t done but that isn’t helpful. Our big problems continue to go unaddressed in serious way. I will vote for Biden again if he runs no question but that doesn’t mean I have to praise his work product. 

Edited August 9, 2022 by Hugo Stiglitz

[ChiTownDoc 21154]

3 hours ago, 'stache said:

I find it a little interesting that trump could probably have gotten the Nixon treatment if he would just shut up and go away. He could focus full time on LIV golf or create a new fake college as long as he would shut up about the election and stop spreading lies and hatred. He chose this path, so yeah, there's no choice but to go after him at all levels and make sure he and his followers find out. I guess he knows his fat ass won't live much longer anyway so might as well continue being a piece of human garbage and accepting the adulation of 65 million fucktards.

Imagine if he could just shut up even a little bit...would have been a lot more scary.  Luckily he self immolates at every opportunity.  I find it very hard to believe this was just about having secret documents (top secret not even possible to take off site as noted above).  I think there's a lot more to it and the evidence is quite strong...no way the FBI/AG are going after him on something soft.  Something about going for the king's head and not missing.  That's very much in play here.  

[Ojo Rojo 1967]

For like the 1,000,000th time over the last few years I've thought to myself, "What's crazy is..."  The latest one: "What's crazy is that a bunch of people think that going after Trump for criminal acts is a purely political act on behalf of the Democratically controlled government, regardless of the fact that it certainly appears that he did commit multiple actual crimes.  Meanwhile, these same people literally chanted "lock her up" about Hilary Clinton over the emails that she mishandled, which would have been an actual politically motivated criminal investigation." What is true is derided and dismissed while what is fake is celebrated and treated as truth. It's like everything is upside down. Hey, wait a minute...  Did someone piss off a telekinetic kid and open a portal to another dimension?

Edited August 9, 2022 by Ojo Rojo

[TheStoicPaisano 9930]

2 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

you’re Eskimo bros with magic Johnson ? 
 

not cool 

All I do is share a birthday. 😑

[MissingInAction 25175]

2 hours ago, longhornmatt said:

If Jeffrey Dahmer can be thrown in jail, so can you!  Freedom in this country died the day Jeffrey was arrested!

If eating the same dudes I'm banging is wrong, then I don't wanna be right.

[Biff Tannen 45715]

3 minutes ago, MissingInAction said:

If eating the same dudes I'm banging is wrong, then I don't wanna be right.

[Chopper 17244]

 

['stache 21849]

3 minutes ago, Ojo Rojo said:

For like the 1,000,000th time over the last few years I've thought to myself, "What's crazy is..."  The latest one: "What's crazy is that a bunch of people think that going after Trump for criminal acts is a purely political act on behalf of the Democratically controlled government, regardless of the fact that it certainly appears that he did commit multiple actual crimes.  Meanwhile, these same people literally chanted "lock her up" about Hilary Clinton over the emails that she mishandled, which would have been an actual politically motivated criminal investigation." What is true is derided and dismissed while what is fake is celebrated and treated as truth. It's like everything is upside down. Hey, wait a minute...  Did someone piss off a telekinetic kid and open a portal to another dimension?

Um, there was a politically motivated criminal investigation, right before the 2016 election, and it went nowhere because they found nothing but some minor breaches of protocol. It was the governmental classified equivalent of the IT guy telling you "you can't make your password "password" its unsafe and leave the company vulnerable in ways that are easily avoided." 

[tx 3 putt 77359]

51 minutes ago, Satchel said:

Is everybody underwhelmed about the revelation of Alex Jones having sent a nude pic of his now former wife to Roger Stone?

 

im sure her lawyers will have something to say about it 

[atomheartbevo 89783]

43 minutes ago, BrickHorn said:

Okay, yeah. Sure. But the Dems won’t be firing shots over this, and no one on the left or left-leaning media is even suggesting we’re at a point where they should even consider it (thank God). But they’re certainly talking about that shit on rightwing internets. 

Trump spent 2020 claiming the election would be rigged, then November and December of 2020, all of 2021, and all of 2022 (so far) talking about how the election was stolen, and yet thousands aren't gathering in Florida or at Trump Tower in NYC waiting for him to lead them into watering Patriot Trees(tm) with the blood of liberals or whatever.

They talk a lot of shit, but at the end of the day, they go home to their double-wides or the poorly-constructed McMansions that still have many years to be paid off because they are living paycheck-to-paychekc, and he gets on the internet and look at porn or catch up on sports scores or look at videos of people doing stupid shit and getting hurt, or they watch the latest dad shows like Terminal List or Reacher or Jack Ryan and fantasize about being That Guy, while their kids yell and scream in the next room over who gets the iPad, and their wives are complaining about some family member, and they don't even realize their wives are fucking the lawn guy or the neighborhood lifeguard but he thinks maybe something is off because the lawn guy seems to mow the lawn 3-4 times a week when he's only paying for it to be mowed twice a week, and all he can do is fantasize about buying some lifted dually and getting a deer lease that they could drive to under the guise of "hunting" when in reality it's all just an excuse to get away from their families and co-workers and bosses, but they can't do that because too much money is being spent by family members on stupid shit they don't actually need, so instead they are stuck listening to their kids scream and whine, and their wives bitch about what their friends or other family members can afford to buy but why can't they have nice things like Edna, and they get angry, and they need somebody to blame, and so they start looking at social media, and it's Joe Biden's fault that gas prices went up a buck or two for a few months, but they are coming back down, but it doesn't matter, it's the librools fault that the extra $200 they spent on gas over the last two months meant they can't go on a fancy vacation to Mobile or Port Aransas (and that $200 doesn't really matter because we are talking about them leaving a day early).  And they'll whine and amp themselves up on TexAgs or SECRant or Free Republic, and they'll tell themselves and others that if the election was stolen and therefore their manhood questioned, they should rise to the call and go storm the Capitol and restore Donald Fuckin' Trump to the White House, and they talk about all of the guns they have and how they'd use them to make the librools beg for mercy, and then they'll sit through a shitty dinner that is probably a warmed up frozen TV dinner, but they won't call their wife out on it because they know they'd be turbofucked without her because they don't know jack shit about their own household because they zone out when their spouse starts talking about bills or the new Jeep Cherokee she wants or whatever, and then later on they'll spend 20 minutes in a hot shower fantasizing about the weather forecaster on the local TV channel, and then they'll climb in bed hoping that their wife will be excited to feel him bump up against her back with his pathetically tiny 5.5-inch dick fully erect, meanwhile his wife is lying their eyes closed, legs closed like vise grips, praying that he'll get bored and go rub one out on the toilet with his phone and whatever porn site he looks at.  And he does and gets back in bed that because that's the routine that's been established.

And then he gets up and does it all again the next day.  The thoughts of leading an insurrection that he had while reading TexAgs or SECRant or Free Republic vanish, because at the end of the day, as much as they are a pain in the ass, he doesn't want to subject his family to him being arrested and losing his job and he's scared of being in prison because he read too many posts by some Labo or Loba guy on some random Texas sports forum he came across, and he knows his life is utter shit, but his boy is named after him, and it wouldn't be right to leave him without a dad, because what if his wife married somebody like the lawn guy who has brown skin and barely speaks English, and plus he doesn't want to embarrass his own daddy or grandaddy by leaving his kids to be raised by somebody who is probably illegally here, but he's too afraid to turn him in because MS-13 would probably come to his house and rape his dogs and traffic his kids.

And so he doesn't do jack shit, but he can't let the guys online know that.

Edited August 9, 2022 by atomheartbevo

[chainsaw 9873]

7 minutes ago, Ojo Rojo said:

For like the 1,000,000th time over the last few years I've thought to myself, "What's crazy is..."  The latest one: "What's crazy is that a bunch of people think that going after Trump for criminal acts is a purely political act on behalf of the Democratically controlled government, regardless of the fact that it certainly appears that he did commit multiple actual crimes.  Meanwhile, these same people literally chanted "lock her up" about Hilary Clinton over the emails that she mishandled, which would have been an actual politically motivated criminal investigation." What is true is derided and dismissed while what is fake is celebrated and treated as truth. It's like everything is upside down. Hey, wait a minute...  Did someone piss off a telekinetic kid and open a portal to another dimension?

It's not "crazy" so much as routine fascism since time immemorial.

[Your Mom 4849]

27 minutes ago, Azbadlands said:

I'm just saying a lot of people like myself have moved own and "accepted" the results of the election but still have questions with no answers about all of the anomolies in the election that do not make sense.  But, we are asked to accept it and I have accepted it for the good of the country as 3rd worldish as that sounds.

Your questions do in fact have answers, you've just chosen not to pursue them or unwilling to accept them because it wasn't the answer you wanted.  Every accusation of fraud and every notable abnormality has been investigated and not a single one of them has been significant enough to have changed the result in a single precinct anywhere, much less a state.  

[Chopper 17244]

I'm so old I remember when the GQP was concerned about the privacy of judges dining at public restaurants, and were screaming that protesters walking on a public sidewalk shouldn't be allowed within miles of a justice's home.

 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, atomheartbevo said:

They are fucking sheep (not in the aggy way), which is why they are following Trump in the first place.  They aren’t rushing out to storm FBI buildings.  

Hell, out of that 74 million that voted for him, how could he not get, I don’t know, say 200,000 actively storming the Capitol after he had spent 8 months telling them the election would be stolen if he lost?  Why not 20,000 breaching the Capitol?  If they honestly believed Biden won a rigged election, but they weren’t willing to risk their lives or even a chance of an arrest, what does that say about them?

For a lot of these folks, Trump is a useful tool to lash out at the left, but they don’t view him as anything more than that, and certainly not worth risking a criminal record, jobs, etc. over.

And more than a few are probably wondering if Republicans are behind this, including DeSantis.

If anything sticks and he’s stripped of future political duties, then fucking yea DeSantis. 

[Red Five 40881]

4 minutes ago, Chopper said:

I'm so old I remember when the GQP was concerned about the privacy of judges dining at public restaurants, and were screaming that protesters walking on a public sidewalk shouldn't be allowed within miles of a justice's home.

 

Wouldn't he need to know the, you know, reason for the search first? 

"This is outrageous!!"

"Do you know why the warrant was signed by this judge?"

"no"

[Azbadlands 109]

27 minutes ago, NameAlreadyInUse said:

Option #1:  I bolded the part that lets me know you are 100% full of shit.  Just stop pretending.

Option #2:  What anomalies are you talking about?  Care to share them?  

You pick the one that makes the most sense to you.

I can name a couple of many anomolies in the election that make no sense to me.  

1st how did Biden get to 81 million votes without taking any from Trump?  Trump actually got more votes too than his first election.  That never happened in history...

2nd How did Trump win all but one of the 19 Belweather counties and both of the Belweather states and still lose?  

Can you clear those up for me?  

 

 

[Pig Bellmont 8731]

2 minutes ago, Azbadlands said:

I can name a couple of many anomolies in the election that make no sense to me.  

1st how did Biden get to 81 million votes without taking any from Trump?  Trump actually got more votes too than his first election.  That never happened in history...

2nd How did Trump win all but one of the 19 Belweather counties and both of the Belweather states and still lose?  

Can you clear those up for me?  

 

 

[atomheartbevo 89783]

7 minutes ago, Porterhouse said:

If anything sticks and he’s stripped of future political duties, then fucking yea DeSantis. 

That's the scary thing - DeSantis is far smarter than Trump (although he can't read or motivate people and crowds as well as Trump does) and he's been watching all of the fuckups that Trump has made.  He knows what not to do, what works, who to schmooze, etc.

[immamac 42962]

4 minutes ago, Azbadlands said:

I can name a couple of many anomolies in the election that make no sense to me.  

1st how did Biden get to 81 million votes without taking any from Trump?  Trump actually got more votes too than his first election.  That never happened in history...

2nd How did Trump win all but one of the 19 Belweather counties and both of the Belweather states and still lose?  

Can you clear those up for me?  

 

 

Are you trolling or trying to get banned? Asking for a friend. 

[chainsaw 9873]

1 minute ago, Azbadlands said:

1st how did Biden get to 81 million votes without taking any from Trump?  Trump actually got more votes too than his first election.  That never happened in history...

Lots of people didn't vote in 2016. Trump is so bad at his job, and dangerous to global stability, that Biden got 81M votes from former Trump voters, former Green voters, and former nonvoters.

You don't actually know if everyone who voted for him in 2016 managed to vote for him in 2020. For one, a lot of them died of covid by then. For another, a lot of them were going to be dead of natural causes by 2020 regardless of covid. And then a bunch of people only voted for him because they hated Hillary and not because they ever cared about him. 

 

4 minutes ago, Azbadlands said:

2nd How did Trump win all but one of the 19 Belweather counties and both of the Belweather states and still lose? 

He lost PA, WI, MI, and AZ. Deal with it.

[Surly Bevo 25142]

5 minutes ago, Azbadlands said:

I can name a couple of many anomolies in the election that make no sense to me.  

1st how did Biden get to 81 million votes without taking any from Trump?  Trump actually got more votes too than his first election.  That never happened in history...

2nd How did Trump win all but one of the 19 Belweather counties and both of the Belweather states and still lose?  

Can you clear those up for me?  

 

 

Belweather huh?  That's what you're going with....belweather?

[chainsaw 9873]

2 minutes ago, Pig Bellmont said:

I decided to humor him since I got time.

[Biff Tannen 45715]

14 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Trump spent 2020 claiming the election would be rigged, then November and December of 2020, all of 2021, and all of 2022 (so far) talking about how the election was stolen, and yet thousands aren't gathering in Florida or at Trump Tower in NYC waiting for him to lead them into watering Patriot Trees(tm) with the blood of liberals or whatever.

They talk a lot of shit, but at the end of the day, they go home to their double-wides or the poorly-constructed McMansions that still have many years to be paid off because they are living paycheck-to-paychekc, and he gets on the internet and look at porn or catch up on sports scores or look at videos of people doing stupid shit and getting hurt, or they watch the latest dad shows like Terminal List or Reacher or Jack Ryan and fantasize about being That Guy, while their kids yell and scream in the next room over who gets the iPad, and their wives are complaining about some family member, and they don't even realize their wives are fucking the lawn guy or the neighborhood lifeguard but he thinks maybe something is off because the lawn guy seems to mow the lawn 3-4 times a week when he's only paying for it to be mowed twice a week, and all he can do is fantasize about buying some lifted dually and getting a deer lease that they could drive to under the guise of "hunting" when in reality it's all just an excuse to get away from their families and co-workers and bosses, but they can't do that because too much money is being spent by family members on stupid shit they don't actually need, so instead they are stuck listening to their kids scream and whine, and their wives bitch about what their friends or other family members can afford to buy but why can't they have nice things like Edna, and they get angry, and they need somebody to blame, and so they start looking at social media, and it's Joe Biden's fault that gas prices went up a buck or two for a few months, but they are coming back down, but it doesn't matter, it's the librools fault that the extra $200 they spent on gas over the last two months meant they can't go on a fancy vacation to Mobile or Port Aransas (and that $200 doesn't really matter because we are talking about them leaving a day early).  And they'll whine and amp themselves up on TexAgs or SECRant or Free Republic, and they'll tell themselves and others that if the election was stolen and therefore their manhood questioned, they should rise to the call and go storm the Capitol and restore Donald Fuckin' Trump to the White House, and they talk about all of the guns they have and how they'd use them to make the librools beg for mercy, and then they'll sit through a shitty dinner that is probably a warmed up frozen TV dinner, but they won't call their wife out on it because they know they'd be turbofucked without her because they don't know jack shit about their own household because they zone out when their spouse starts talking about bills or the new Jeep Cherokee she wants or whatever, and then later on they'll spend 20 minutes in a hot shower fantasizing about the weather forecaster on the local TV channel, and then they'll climb in bed hoping that their wife will be excited to feel him bump up against her back with his pathetically tiny 5.5-inch dick fully erect, meanwhile his wife is lying their eyes closed, legs closed like vise grips, praying that he'll get bored and go rub one out on the toilet with his phone and whatever porn site he looks at.  And he does and gets back in bed that because that's the routine that's been established.

And then he gets up and does it all again the next day.  The thoughts of leading an insurrection that he had while reading TexAgs or SECRant or Free Republic vanish, because at the end of the day, as much as they are a pain in the ass, he doesn't want to subject his family to him being arrested and losing his job and he's scared of being in prison because he read too many posts by some Labo or Loba guy on some random Texas sports forum he came across, and he knows his life is utter shit, but his boy is named after him, and it wouldn't be right to leave him without a dad, because what if his wife married somebody like the lawn guy who has brown skin and barely speaks English, and plus he doesn't want to embarrass his own daddy or grandaddy by leaving his kids to be raised by somebody who is probably illegally here, but he's too afraid to turn him in because MS-13 would probably come to his house and rape his dogs and traffic his kids.

And so he doesn't do jack shit, but he can't let the guys online know that.

My favorite part is the lobo shout out.

[Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand 13587]

59 minutes ago, Chopper said:

 

Or Target cashiers wished them Happy Holidays...

[Bullneck 19205]

 

 

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

That's the scary thing - DeSantis is far smarter than Trump (although he can't read or motivate people and crowds as well as Trump does) and he's been watching all of the fuckups that Trump has made.  He knows what not to do, what works, who to schmooze, etc.

He’s always seemed to me to have an arms length relationship with Trump that has evolved to a stiff arm currently. Am I reading that incorrectly?

[atomheartbevo 89783]

2 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

My favorite part is the lobo shout out.

[Bullneck 19205]

8 minutes ago, Azbadlands said:

I can name a couple of many anomolies in the election that make no sense to me.  

1st how did Biden get to 81 million votes without taking any from Trump?  Trump actually got more votes too than his first election.  That never happened in history...

2nd How did Trump win all but one of the 19 Belweather counties and both of the Belweather states and still lose?  

Can you clear those up for me?  

 

3 minutes ago, immamac said:

Are you trolling or trying to get banned? Asking for a friend. 

Don't ban him, just change his username to "Azdumblands."

[sidis 9832]

5 minutes ago, Azbadlands said:

I can name a couple of many anomolies in the election that make no sense to me.  

1st how did Biden get to 81 million votes without taking any from Trump?  Trump actually got more votes too than his first election.  That never happened in history...

2nd How did Trump win all but one of the 19 Belweather counties and both of the Belweather states and still lose?  

Can you clear those up for me?  

 

 

2) there is only one bellwether county that has not deviated from the outcome since 1980 so your notion of 19 bellwether counties being predictive is premised on bad information.  in terms of counties that have only deviated from the national results once since 1980, hillary clinton won 14 of them.  does that somehow demonstrate to you that the 2016 election was anomalous overall?  demographics and political preferences change, bellwether areas can cease to be bellwether areas for all sorts of entirely benign reasons.

1) if you are asking this in good faith - i genuinely can't tell - then the answer lies in voter turnout numbers.  approximately 23 million more people voted in 2020 (historically highest turnout ever) than in 2016 in which there was low voter enthusiasm.  in 2016, 136.7 million people voted.  in 2020, 159.7 million people voted.

does that sufficiently answer your questions?

[Foosters 17883]

9 minutes ago, Azbadlands said:

I can name a couple of many anomolies in the election that make no sense to me.  

1st how did Biden get to 81 million votes without taking any from Trump?  Trump actually got more votes too than his first election.  That never happened in history...

2nd How did Trump win all but one of the 19 Belweather counties and both of the Belweather states and still lose?  

Can you clear those up for me?  

 

 

Belweather argument:

Quote

Former President Trump and his supporters continue to loudly assert that he really won the 2020 election even though all the alleged direct evidence of fraud has not passed the “sniff test” of local courts, including those with Republican judges. The indirect evidence for election fraud rests on various statistical claims about the high level of improbability of certain features of the 2020 election. One such claim is that Trump’s victories in 2020 in the vast bulk of the counties that had previously been labeled as bellwethers proved that Trump really won the election and was denied the victory because of fraud.

This claim is basically absurd. We find that bellwether success is almost entirely a matter of random coin tosses in multiple counties over time to create an appearance of predictive power that is a matter of chance. The Princeton political scientist, Edward Tufte opens his 1975 co-authored article on bellwethers with: “Prior to the 1936 presidential election, the conventional political wisdom had it that as Maine voted, so went the rest of the nation. After the 46-state landslide, James Farley, Roosevelt’s campaign manager, revised the theory: ‘As goes Maine, so goes Vermont’.”

Bellwethers aren’t great at predicting the future – or the past

And yet, the belief in bellwether states or counties as predictors of US presidential elections is a phoenix that is constantly being reborn. It is as if the devastating rebuttals by Tufte in Data Analysis for Politics and Policy or the equally devastating review of the evidence in David A. Hopkins’ 2017 book Red Fighting Blue  never happened. In a 2020 article, Daniel Zimny-Schmitt and Michael Harris look for bellwether counties in the period 1980-2016 and identify nineteen such. In an October 7, 2020, essay in the New York Times, David Wasserman looked to ten allegedly bellwether counties for evidence that Donald Trump is in serious trouble. Articles after the 2020 election examining the predictive power of previous bellwethers are found in other sources, including the Wall Street Journal and the Epoch Times.

But not only are bellwethers not really predictors of future success, the likelihood of finding long streaks of prior predictive success has gone down. Comparing the most recent elections (2000-2020) to those in earlier periods (1960-1980), we find a striking decline in the proportion of bellwether counties, i.e., those with correct prediction in past elections. Our model also links this decline to increases in polarization. Bellwethers must make correct predictions regardless of which party wins election, but polarization makes it increasingly likely that counties will split into ones that vote regularly for a Republican or for a Democratic presidential nominee. Thus, as polarization rises, the potential for counties shifting their mean party preference across different elections declines.

Why is belief in the existence of bellwether states and counties (especially the latter) so strong? We believe that there are two main reasons.

First, we can readily imagine that some counties demographically/politically mirror the nation, and thus monitoring this small set of counties closely would tell us with high predictive reliability what will happen nationally. This belief in the efficacy of small numbers is probably strengthened by the fact that a random sample of only 2,000 or so voters is considered by statisticians large enough to predict election results in an electorate of well 140 million or so – at least if the sample is truly random and the respondents are not lying either about their preferences or the likelihood that they will vote in the election.

Second, when we examine a short string of elections, we do indeed, find that some counties go with the winner in all (or virtually all the elections). Thus, for some sequences of elections there are indeed, bellwether counties.

Unfortunately, however, neither of the reasons for why we might think that previous bellwethers will continue to be bellwethers is valid. With respect to the notion that bellwethers are demographically representative, this appears not to true. In particular, recent research which identified nineteen bellwether counties found that they “tended to be whiter, older, less educated, have lower median incomes, have a lower percentage of workers in the labor force, and have higher rates of vacant housing than the country as a whole.” These counties also disproportionately came from the Midwest and the Northeast. Moreover, if we look at the political features of the bellwethers, we do not find them exclusively among counties that are highly politically competitive. Of their nineteen bellwethers, only Essex County, Vermont can be considered as a political competitive county.

So, where are the bellwether counties?

If it is not demographically representative counties or politically competitive counties which are the bellwethers, why then do we find bellwethers? The simple answer is that chance effects can be much greater than most people realize. Even if the mean likelihood of a match between county and presidential outcome is exactly 50 percent, in the classic argument offered by Deutsch and Madow in 1961, on the appearance of wisdom in large organizations, some counties will, by chance alone, have high records of predictive success and some may even have perfect records, especially if there are many counties and if we limit the number of elections over which we are requiring successful predictions.

As Figure 1 shows, with roughly 3600 counties, the number of counties which correctly predict the election’s outcome can be non-trivial even for relatively long sequence of elections when the probability of a correct prediction is exactly 50 percent, i.e., a coin flip.

For example, across seven elections, we would expect to see 28 bellwether counties. Moreover, once we allow for bellwethers to have less than perfect records of success, the expected numbers of bellwethers increases much more rapidly than most (including us) would expect. For example, if we call a county a bellwether if it has one less correct match than the number of elections in a sequence, we will get nearly 19 bellwethers even in a set of eleven elections, and in a set of seven elections, we will see 197 bellwethers – far more than the 27 we would find under our assumptions when we require a bellwether to have an unblemished record of predictive success.

Kinda hard to "debunk" your other question, unless you're under the belief that every register voter actually voted in 2016 and then no one registered to vote between 2016-2020

[NameAlreadyInUse 5114]

Not piling on

 

Edited August 9, 2022 by NameAlreadyInUse
Already covered

[Foosters 17883]

9 minutes ago, Azbadlands said:

I can name a couple of many anomolies in the election that make no sense to me.  

1st how did Biden get to 81 million votes without taking any from Trump?  Trump actually got more votes too than his first election.  That never happened in history...

2nd How did Trump win all but one of the 19 Belweather counties and both of the Belweather states and still lose?  

Can you clear those up for me?  

 

 

Belweather argument:

Quote

Former President Trump and his supporters continue to loudly assert that he really won the 2020 election even though all the alleged direct evidence of fraud has not passed the “sniff test” of local courts, including those with Republican judges. The indirect evidence for election fraud rests on various statistical claims about the high level of improbability of certain features of the 2020 election. One such claim is that Trump’s victories in 2020 in the vast bulk of the counties that had previously been labeled as bellwethers proved that Trump really won the election and was denied the victory because of fraud.

This claim is basically absurd. We find that bellwether success is almost entirely a matter of random coin tosses in multiple counties over time to create an appearance of predictive power that is a matter of chance. The Princeton political scientist, Edward Tufte opens his 1975 co-authored article on bellwethers with: “Prior to the 1936 presidential election, the conventional political wisdom had it that as Maine voted, so went the rest of the nation. After the 46-state landslide, James Farley, Roosevelt’s campaign manager, revised the theory: ‘As goes Maine, so goes Vermont’.”

Bellwethers aren’t great at predicting the future – or the past

And yet, the belief in bellwether states or counties as predictors of US presidential elections is a phoenix that is constantly being reborn. It is as if the devastating rebuttals by Tufte in Data Analysis for Politics and Policy or the equally devastating review of the evidence in David A. Hopkins’ 2017 book Red Fighting Blue  never happened. In a 2020 article, Daniel Zimny-Schmitt and Michael Harris look for bellwether counties in the period 1980-2016 and identify nineteen such. In an October 7, 2020, essay in the New York Times, David Wasserman looked to ten allegedly bellwether counties for evidence that Donald Trump is in serious trouble. Articles after the 2020 election examining the predictive power of previous bellwethers are found in other sources, including the Wall Street Journal and the Epoch Times.

But not only are bellwethers not really predictors of future success, the likelihood of finding long streaks of prior predictive success has gone down. Comparing the most recent elections (2000-2020) to those in earlier periods (1960-1980), we find a striking decline in the proportion of bellwether counties, i.e., those with correct prediction in past elections. Our model also links this decline to increases in polarization. Bellwethers must make correct predictions regardless of which party wins election, but polarization makes it increasingly likely that counties will split into ones that vote regularly for a Republican or for a Democratic presidential nominee. Thus, as polarization rises, the potential for counties shifting their mean party preference across different elections declines.

Why is belief in the existence of bellwether states and counties (especially the latter) so strong? We believe that there are two main reasons.

First, we can readily imagine that some counties demographically/politically mirror the nation, and thus monitoring this small set of counties closely would tell us with high predictive reliability what will happen nationally. This belief in the efficacy of small numbers is probably strengthened by the fact that a random sample of only 2,000 or so voters is considered by statisticians large enough to predict election results in an electorate of well 140 million or so – at least if the sample is truly random and the respondents are not lying either about their preferences or the likelihood that they will vote in the election.

Second, when we examine a short string of elections, we do indeed, find that some counties go with the winner in all (or virtually all the elections). Thus, for some sequences of elections there are indeed, bellwether counties.

Unfortunately, however, neither of the reasons for why we might think that previous bellwethers will continue to be bellwethers is valid. With respect to the notion that bellwethers are demographically representative, this appears not to true. In particular, recent research which identified nineteen bellwether counties found that they “tended to be whiter, older, less educated, have lower median incomes, have a lower percentage of workers in the labor force, and have higher rates of vacant housing than the country as a whole.” These counties also disproportionately came from the Midwest and the Northeast. Moreover, if we look at the political features of the bellwethers, we do not find them exclusively among counties that are highly politically competitive. Of their nineteen bellwethers, only Essex County, Vermont can be considered as a political competitive county.

So, where are the bellwether counties?

If it is not demographically representative counties or politically competitive counties which are the bellwethers, why then do we find bellwethers? The simple answer is that chance effects can be much greater than most people realize. Even if the mean likelihood of a match between county and presidential outcome is exactly 50 percent, in the classic argument offered by Deutsch and Madow in 1961, on the appearance of wisdom in large organizations, some counties will, by chance alone, have high records of predictive success and some may even have perfect records, especially if there are many counties and if we limit the number of elections over which we are requiring successful predictions.

As Figure 1 shows, with roughly 3600 counties, the number of counties which correctly predict the election’s outcome can be non-trivial even for relatively long sequence of elections when the probability of a correct prediction is exactly 50 percent, i.e., a coin flip.

For example, across seven elections, we would expect to see 28 bellwether counties. Moreover, once we allow for bellwethers to have less than perfect records of success, the expected numbers of bellwethers increases much more rapidly than most (including us) would expect. For example, if we call a county a bellwether if it has one less correct match than the number of elections in a sequence, we will get nearly 19 bellwethers even in a set of eleven elections, and in a set of seven elections, we will see 197 bellwethers – far more than the 27 we would find under our assumptions when we require a bellwether to have an unblemished record of predictive success.

Kinda hard to "debunk" your other question, unless you're under the belief that every register voter actually voted in 2016 and then no one registered to vote between 2016-2020.

[Biff Tannen 45715]

[Gil Bang 26000]

Twitter says Hannity just named the judge that signed the warrant. 

I hope to fuck that the judge has security. 

[Ghost of LL 15539]

37 minutes ago, Satchel said:

I would not give short shift to how the events of the last ten days have animated the Democratic base.

I agree with that.  It's rare for a president to have this number of solid legislative victories this close to the midterms, and even more rare for them to be on things that are so popular.

Couple that with the fact that the Democrats have a single antagonist, which is unique in American politics, and things are looking up.  If the Fed can just bring down inflation a scooch before November, the Democrats could be in a really decent position.

58 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Somebody is about to get black-listed/canceled

 

 

Tim Scott doesn't know anything more than we do.  It's just that Tim Scott isn't a moron.  He knows that if the DOJ executes a search warrant on a former president, it's because they've already go significant evidence of serious criminality.  So it's time to keep your damned head down and be cautious.

[safe sex 11746]

44 minutes ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

Holee fuck ing hell.

If you haven't seen his show, watch it right away. "I Think You Should Leave" on Netflix

[Ted Lange 16113]

A lot of this boils down to this.

 

 

Large percentage of Trumpers care more about OWNING the Libs then they do having a functioning government.   It is a lifestyle.

And with the Dotard's house getting raided, the libs are now doing this to them

 

 

 

 

[Goredho 17414]

11 minutes ago, Azbadlands said:

I can name a couple of many anomolies in the election that make no sense to me.  

1st how did Biden get to 81 million votes without taking any from Trump?  Trump actually got more votes too than his first election.  That never happened in history...

2nd How did Trump win all but one of the 19 Belweather counties and both of the Belweather states and still lose?  

Can you clear those up for me?  

 

 

How many lawsuits were filed contesting the results?  How many were overseen and or ruled on by conservative appointed judges?  How many were found to have merit and ruled in favor of Trump and his stolen election claims?

Let’s just say it’s equal to the MLB batting average that could be produced by my dead grandmother’s corpse.

[chainsaw 9873]

Just now, Ghost of LL said:

I agree with that.  It's rare for a president to have this number of solid legislative victories this close to the midterms, and even more rare for them to be on things that are so popular.

Couple that with the fact that the Democrats have a single antagonist, which is unique in American politics, and things are looking up.  If the Fed can just bring down inflation a scooch before November, the Democrats could be in a really decent position.

Tim Scott doesn't know anything more than we do.  It's just that Tim Scott isn't a moron.  He knows that if the DOJ executes a search warrant on a former president, it's because they've already go significant evidence of serious criminality.  So it's time to keep your damned head down and be cautious.

I think he might. I haven't seen many other politicians talking as loudly today as they did last night.

[Bullneck 19205]

2 minutes ago, Gil Bang said:

Twitter says Hannity just named the judge that signed the warrant. 

I hope to fuck that the judge has security. 

Of course.  

[Biff Tannen 45715]

4 minutes ago, Ghost of LL said:

It's just that Tim Scott isn't a moron. 

 

[HenryJames 66164]

5 minutes ago, Gil Bang said:

Twitter says Hannity just named the judge that signed the warrant. 

I hope to fuck that the judge has security. 

Lenny Dykstra named his synagogue.

[chainsaw 9873]

 

[chainsaw 9873]

The bad takes keep coming

 

[A-Tex Devil 2462]

15 minutes ago, Porterhouse said:

He’s always seemed to me to have an arms length relationship with Trump that has evolved to a stiff arm currently. Am I reading that incorrectly?

DeSantis was a die hard Trumper (the opportunistic, if not the dogmatic, kind) until the last 18 month or so when he started to threaten Trump in polling then Trump distanced himself from him.  I am pretty surprised that it is Desantis and not Rick Scott that will be the one coming out of Florida to run in 2024, although nothing to prevent Rick Scott from trying.  By the way, those two guys do not like each other either.

[Pato del Muerto 52572]

Gary Johnson and Jill stein got almost 6 million votes combined in 2016 (4.5 and 1.5)

Those parties got 2.3 million total votes in 2020 (1.9 and 0.4). Those votes went somewhere. Plus the year over year increase. 

Edited August 9, 2022 by Pato del Muerto

[Ted Lange 16113]

3 minutes ago, chainsaw said:

 

[Red Five 40881]

I think Scott Adams hypnotized himself sometime around 2016. He didn't used to be a crazy nutbag.