Democratic Socialism is Still Socialism

It's the hilarious Steven Crowder, for Prager University:

The 'Unskewed Polls' of 2016

We've seen this movie before.

Back in 2012, a bunch of conservatives became fixated on some obscure website called "Unskewed Polls," which adjusted that year's election polling correcting for partisan composition, and so forth.

The results were spectacularly wrong. That is, most of the polling in 2012 was accurate. Indeed, Gallup quit doing presidential horse race polling this year because it botched its surveys four years ago, especially its prediction of Romney winning the popular vote.

I'm not going down that rabbit hole again.

I've already scheduled a post for tomorrow morning, linking Sabato's Crystal Ball, which has Hillary Clinton winning with 322 electors. Perhaps she won't do that well. It's just that based on current polling, Donald Trump falls well short of the 270 electors needed to pull off an upset.

He'd need to win Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Ohio to get 269, according to the Wall Street Journal. He'd need to pick up one more state to go over the top, perhaps Colorado.

 We'll see, in any case.

Meanwhile, here's this year's "Unskewed Polls," at Gateway Pundit (don't get too excited).

See, "Here’s Why THE POLLS ARE WRONG=> Trump Will WIN IN A LANDSLIDE! (POLLS)."




I'd love for tomorrow map to turn out like this, although I'm realistic.

I mean, c'mon, they've even got Trump winning the Keystone State. I'm just a wee bit skeptical.

Donald Trump’s Narrow Path

I really don't see an Electoral College path, but that's me.

He's going to need to sweep up all the states Mitt Romney won in 2012, and then take back a few that Obama won, like Iowa and Colorado, not to mention Florida and Ohio.

At WSJ, "Donald Trump’s Path to Victory Is Narrow":

PHILADELPHIA — After months of campaigning, the presidential race has come down to this: Democrat Hillary Clinton has several apparent paths to the White House, while Republican Donald Trump must all-but sweep the battlegrounds where the race has centered, and will likely need at least one Democratic-leaning state, too.

For Mrs. Clinton, victory would require her winning one or two of the most contested states, if she can hold on to those that have long favored Democratic nominees. Mr. Trump has said he has a shot at those Democratic-leaning states, which include Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota and New Mexico. Yet polls in each show Mrs. Clinton ahead.

Nationally, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Sunday found Mrs. Clinton leading Mr. Trump by 4 points among likely voters as the two nominees head into their final day of campaigning before Tuesday’s election.

For Mr. Trump to win, he must finish ahead of Mrs. Clinton in the battleground states of Florida, Ohio and, in most calculations, North Carolina, analysts from both parties said. His path to victory, far narrower than Mrs. Clinton’s, also likely requires a win in at least one state that has long been in the Democratic column.

“He has to run the table,” said Russ Schriefer, a strategist for Republican Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign.

Mr. Trump’s chances are dim unless he can wrest away a state such as Michigan or Pennsylvania, where he campaigned Sunday, places that haven’t voted Republican in presidential races since 1988. Looking to shore up Mrs. Clinton’s base, her campaign added stops in both states Monday and began TV ads in Michigan, where polls have shown the race tightening.

Mr. Trump on Sunday followed a campaign schedule that outlined a possible path to victory—cutting through Midwestern and mid-Atlantic states, regions rich in the working-class, white voters who help form his base of support. He campaigned in Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan and Pennsylvania, each of which has a largely white voter pool that could boost his chances.

He also appeared in Virginia, a state where the Clinton campaign is so confident that Mrs. Clinton last campaigned there in July.

Democrats begin with an advantage in the hunt for the 270 Electoral College votes required to win. In every election since 2000, they have won states that account for 242 electoral votes; Republicans have won states that total 179 in the same period. The GOP, however, gets to a starting tally of 190 by adding Indiana, which backed Barack Obama in 2008 but has since shifted reliably Republican.

“The map naturally has a blue tilt to it simply because there’s a history of these states voting Democratic,” said Neil Newhouse, a Republican strategist and pollster. “Simply because of that, she starts on our 40-yard line.”

Mr. Trump is testing the proposition that a Republican can win with an economic message in the industrial Midwest, where states remain largely white.

“We’re going into what they used to call Democrat strongholds where we’re now either tied or ahead,” Mr. Trump said at a rally Saturday. “We’re doing well in places that they don’t believe.”

Beyond his Midwest strategy, Mr. Trump could also win by carrying a large set of battleground states where polls show him within striking distance or ahead: Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Iowa, Nevada and New Hampshire. That combination of victories would produce a 269-269 Electoral College tie...

Well, that's all we need, an Electoral College tie. The election would go to the House, where Trump would likely win. Talk about Democrats blowing through the roof. It'll be worse than 2000.

But keep reading.

Rhian Sugden Frolicking on the Beach

She's so sweet.

At Page 3, "Rhian Sugden pours curves into gorgeous red bikini for birthday beach holiday: The glamour model celebrated her 30th birthday with fiance Oliver Mellor."

Can you guess which of our #Page3 princesses we spotted frolicking on the beach? https://t.co/NULv6uwvUz pic.twitter.com/GTT08a9Y4g

— Page 3 (@Page3) November 7, 2016

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Deal of the Day: The Hunger Games: Complete 4 Film Collection (Blu-ray and Digital HD)

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BONUS: Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes: The Way to the White House. Also, Theodore White, The Making of the President 1960.

In the Sunset of the Baby Boomers' Generation, Election Reawakens an Old Divide

I'm a boomer, born on the tail end of the generation, in the early 1960s.

At the New York Times:

8 years after Obama lamented "psychodrama of the baby boom generation" & 12 years after litigating Bush, Kerry, Nam!https://t.co/U4ZrD0vpWO

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) November 7, 2016

They came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, in the traumatic aftermath of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They fought and protested a war together, argued over Nixon and Kissinger together, laughed at Archie Bunker together. As children, they practiced air-raid drills; as adults, they cheered the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In the 1990s, they saw one of their own become president, watching him gain glory as one of the most gifted politicians of his time, but also infamy as one of its most self-indulgent — a poster child for the Me Generation.

They are of course the baby boomers, the collective offspring of the most fertile period in American history. At 75 million strong, they have been the most dominant force in American life for three decades, and one of its most maligned. Enlightened but self-centered, introspective but reckless, they are known among the cohorts that followed them — and even to some boomers themselves — as the generation that failed to live up to its lofty ideals, but still held fast to its sense of superiority.

If Bill Clinton was their white-haired id, Hillary Clinton is their superego in a pantsuit. A second Clinton presidency could represent a last hurrah for the baby boomers. But it could also offer a shot at a kind of generational redemption.

“There is a kind of do-over quality to it,” said Landon Y. Jones, the author of the 1980 book “Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation.” “This is their last chance to get it right.”

A shared history binds the boomers — as do, broadly speaking, some shared traits. Their parents suffered through the Depression and World War II before rearing them in the most prosperous society the world had ever seen. Inevitably, perhaps, they were guided by two polestars: responsibility and entitlement.

Those dueling impulses powered the rise of both Clintons: one impulse galvanizing supporters who deeply admired their commitment to public service, the other galling critics who saw them as playing by their own rules...

Well, if the Clintons are going to be representative of the boomers, I think it's time to pass the baton.

Frankly, even Obama's a better representative, at least in terms of family values. He does seem like he's kept and raised a nice family, which is not true for the Clintons.

The Cyberwarfare Election

I was already thinking about this, as I was considering how I was going to analyze the 2016 election in my upcoming classes.

It's not just cyberwarfare as a political issue, but also a factor impinging directly on the campaigns, such as all the WikiLeaks revelations and accusations of Russian political influence.

In any case, the New York Times, "Under the Din of the Presidential Race Lies a Once and Future Threat: Cyberwarfare":

MANCHESTER, N.H. — The 2016 presidential race will be remembered for many ugly moments, but the most lasting historical marker may be one that neither voters nor American intelligence agencies saw coming: It is the first time that a foreign power has unleashed cyberweapons to disrupt, or perhaps influence, a United States election.

And there is a foreboding sense that, in elections to come, there is no turning back.

The steady drumbeat of allegations of Russian troublemaking — leaks from stolen emails and probes of election-system defenses — has continued through the campaign’s last days. These intrusions, current and former administration officials agree, will embolden other American adversaries, which have been given a vivid demonstration that, when used with some subtlety, their growing digital arsenals can be particularly damaging in the frenzy of a democratic election.

“Most of the biggest stories of this election cycle have had a cybercomponent to them — or the use of information warfare techniques that the Russians, in particular, honed over decades,” said David Rothkopf, the chief executive and editor of Foreign Policy, who has written two histories of the National Security Council. “From stolen emails, to WikiLeaks, to the hacking of the N.S.A.’s tools, and even the debate about how much of this the Russians are responsible for, it’s dominated in a way that we haven’t seen in any prior election.”

The magnitude of this shift has gone largely unrecognized in the cacophony of a campaign dominated by charges of groping and pay-for-play access. Yet the lessons have ranged from the intensely personal to the geostrategic...

Keep reading.

Why America Can't Make Up Its Mind Three Days Before the Election

From Salena Zito, at the New York Post:

I drove 2000 miles on the back roads-from Appalachia to the Rockies.
Meet the other America https://t.co/tgqSybd3uJ pic.twitter.com/WA75u99dZc

— SalenaZito (@SalenaZito) November 7, 2016

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BONUS: Robert S. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War. (I'm still plugging away on this book, and it's worth it!)

Clinton, Trump in Dead Heat for Florida and Ohio, at CBS News Battleground Tracker (VIDEO)

It's Anthony Salvanto, who've I've come to like a lot, for Face the Nation:

Watch, "CBS News Battleground Tracker: Trump, Clinton in Dead Heat in Ohio, Florida."

On election night, it's a bad sign for the Democrats if Hillary's not ahead in states as the polls close. If they're too close to call, that's going to be a good sign for the Republicans.

I'll probably get home around 5:30pm or so, depending on whether there's a line at my polling place, and there's never been one this last few years. Hence, when I turn on the television, it's possible the networks could be projecting a Hillary Clinton electoral college victory. The nets pretty much called it for Obama by 6:00pm on the West Coast in 2012, and I was surprised, since everyone was talking about how it was going to be a long night.

Well, it's possible we'll have a long night this year, and I hope so.

More later.

J.D. Vance and Arlie Russell Hochschild Have Arrived

My books came yesterday.

Here, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, and Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.

There's a combined review of the books at the New Republic, "Red-State Blues: Why do people support Trump and the Tea Party? A native son and a sociologist search for answers."

And thanks to everyone's who's been shopping through my Amazon links.

As you can see, I invest my associate's fees right back into more books!

Hillary Would Complete Obama's Fundamental Transformation of America

I've been saying this for a while.

From John Fonte, at the Claremont Review, "Transformers":

Four Years of Hillary

Hillary Clinton will consolidate and expand Obama’s “fundamental transformation.” America will see both an increase in power for the administrative state, which will breech the parchment barriers of the separation of powers and federalism, and the relentless advance of identity politics, which undermines our traditional civic morality centered on the concept of individual American citizenship.

Since we are perhaps the most litigious society in the world, any Clinton-Trump political comparison must consider how each will treat the interpretation and enforcement of the law. Besides appointments to a sharply divided Supreme Court, the next president will appoint scores of lower court judges and U.S. attorneys, the Attorney General, and lawyers in the Justice Department and throughout the federal agencies. There is every reason to expect that the Clinton Legal Behemoth will push the legal envelope with a vengeance on: Obamacare; climate change; green energy; guns; coal; international law; housing; education; immigration; gender, racial, ethnic, and linguistic disparities; and, of course, expanding the administrative state’s scope and power to the detriment of the separation of powers and federalism. One could well imagine a legal Blitzkrieg against political critics like Dinesh D’Souza, sheriffs who enforce immigration law like Joe Arpaio, climate skeptics, conservative activists, fossil-fuel industry executives, Christians, purveyors of alleged “hate speech,” and perceived enemies of social justice and ethnic/gender equity.

Hadley Arkes writes that Obama “has made a nullity of Congress and the separation of powers. And an administration of the Left will only confirm and entrench these changes.” Under Hillary Clinton, “We can expect a campaign to force religious schools to incorporate abortion in their medical plans and have outreach to LGBT groups. And we can expect new judges in the lower courts to support this war on the religious.”

Clinton’s immigration-integration-diversity agenda will create a new regime and, in many ways, a new people. She has promised even less enforcement than Obama, both at the border and in the interior. Word would get out, certainly in Central America, that any youth able to reach the US border can claim refugee status and then eventually bring his parents. Clinton has also promised to exceed Obama actions on executive amnesty. If she is temporarily blocked by the courts she will, after enough appointments, ultimately get the judges who will approve her actions.

In tandem with Clinton’s promise to increase Syrian refugees by over 500%, the Obama administration recently announced that it seeks to add a new ethnic-racial category to the U.S. Census: “Middle Eastern and North African people.” Doing so would provide “protected status” to many American Muslims, giving them affirmative action preferences and the legal privileges of a “marginalized” group. According to data from DHS there has been a 29% increase under Obama in green cards given to immigrants from Muslim majority nations.

Clinton has promised new “comprehensive immigration reform” legislation in her first 100 days. Republican Congressional leaders eager to “get things done,” not “appear obstructionist”, and “get immigration off the table” might well facilitate this goal by permitting a “conscience vote” in the House, where a unanimous Democratic minority will find enough Republicans to form a majority, and consideration under simple regular order in the Senate. A bill close to the Gang of Eight legislation would mean issuing about 13 million new green cards in Hillary’s first term to overwhelmingly low-skilled, non-English speaking immigrants … who will, of course, vote Democratic. This, in turn, will only accelerate ongoing family chain migration and continuing illegal immigration. As in the Gang of Eight bill, all enforcement provisions will be subject to waivers by Clinton’s DHS Secretary. (There were over 1,000 such waivers in the original Gang of Eight bill.) The massive importation of millions of new low-skilled, non-English speaking, immigrants, of course, cannot be reversed in the election of 2020.

Yet some Republicans seem more concerned about Trump’s alleged sexual misconduct decades ago than Clinton’s endorsement of “open borders” in a speech to foreign bankers on May 16, 2013. Most importantly, this deliberate policy of open borders and mass immigration will be accompanied by an official anti-assimilation policy as the new federal government “integration” strategy, inaugurated by Obama, urges new immigrants to maintain their native languages and cultures, instead of prioritizing English and assimilating into the American way of life...

Read the whole thing.

That piece is a keeper.

Sunday Cartoons

At Flopping Aces, "Sunday Funnies." (It's not posted yet.)



Also at Theo's, "Cartoon Roundup..."

Cartoon Credit: A.F. Branco, "See No Evil."

Hillary Clinton Seems Unfazed by Criticism of Alicia Machado

Pfft.

I ignored this controversy from a few weeks back, but Heat Street's running with an update, posting near-topless photos of this woman Alicia Machado.

Here, "Clinton's campaign seems unfazed by criticism of her surrogate Alicia Machado."

And at Egotastic!, "Alicia Machado Playboy Pictures for the Venezuelan In All of Us."

A political Rule 5, for the last weekend before election day.

What a year and a half it's been. Sheesh.

Feminist Jessica Valenti Knows How She's Gonna Vote

Heh.

On Twitter:

I know what finger I'm voting with! Thanks so much to Stephanie Tamez at @savedtattoo for the beautiful work. pic.twitter.com/KrG8yRgHlc

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) October 27, 2016

And ICYMI, see Robert Stacy McCain, at the Other McCain, "Bad Habits: Cocaine and Feminism."

What Happens After Tuesday? The Mood is Bleak

From Cathleen Decker, at the Los Angeles Times, "What happens after Tuesday? Dismayed voters weigh in on the future of a divided nation":

The uncivil war of rhetoric and resentments is ending, but few have any idea how to bind the nation's wounds. https://t.co/Jqrc1RdvxC

— Cathleen Decker (@cathleendecker) November 6, 2016

The presidential campaign eight years ago is forever wrapped in the soaring and optimistic Obama slogan: “Change we can believe in.” This one’s imagery is the detritus of FBI investigations, a candidate’s vulgarities, accusations of dishonesty, racial dog whistles, misogynist insults.

Any campaign belongs to its times, and this one fits squarely into a worldwide dislocation of the masses from the elites — those of governments, businesses, religions, media. In Great Britain, those sentiments led to the vote to leave the European Union. Here, it has helped to fuel Trump’s rise and limit Clinton’s success.

In an October tracking poll by SurveyMonkey, 50% of Americans said that the country was more divided now than ever before and that the splits would persist “far into the future.” Another 30% agreed that America was more divided than ever, but said the nation could knit itself together in the near future.

That left fewer than 1 in 5 people to assert that the country hadn’t actually sunk to its most divided state.

A cycle of distrust has bred pessimism, no matter the improving unemployment rate or other favorable statistics.

“Even when the news is good, people don’t trust it,” said Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford law professor and political scientist who has studied the national mood. The randomness of threatening events — whether economic collapse or terrorism —  also “makes people jittery,” he said.

That sense of pessimism and dislocation is particularly strong among America’s shrinking white majority.

“Whites are feeling like the earth is moving beneath their feet. Whether it’s an African American president or immigrants, they feel the meaning of America is changing for them,” he said. “And it’s heaped onto the other insecurities.”

All of that can be found in the campaign...

RTWT.

The Death of Elitism

From Salena Zito, at the Washington Examiner":

Somewhere off U.S. 62 between Sharon, Pa., and Masory, Ohio, a sign reads, "You had your chance, it's our turn now."

That homemade sign, located in the fault line of this election in the Mahoning Valley between Ohio and Pennsylvania, in all its simplicity found a way to capture the essence of this presidential cycle.

In fact, it offered more insight into the discord between the American electorate and the governing elite than any pundit has been able to explain, let alone comprehend.

In short, the biggest takeaway from this election no matter who wins is that we have witnessed the end of elitism.

And the power of elites to persuade us has evaporated.

The public no longer has faith in big banks or big companies or big government. People cannot trust the banks because they create sham accounts to meet sales targets, or trust technology companies because they make shoddy cell phone equipment that blows up in our hands only to be replaced with another shoddy phone that blows up in our hands.

And the governing class has failed us miserably, from wars in the Middle East that never end, to a healthcare bill that erodes our income to the politicization of the once trustworthy institutions of the Pentagon, NASA and the Justice Department.

To them, the system is genuinely rigged, and the divide between the Ivy League educated and the state or trade school educated, between the haves and the have-nots, has become so deep that there is no bridge long or sturdy enough to connect them.

It is that very thing that explains why so many Americans are attracted to the deeply flawed candidacy of Donald Trump...

Keep reading.

Paul Rahe: 'How I Might Be Wrong' in Attacking the Never Trumpers

At Ricochet, "How I Might Be Wrong."

He's had second thoughts in light of Trump's foreign policy, and he cites Jeremy Rabkin and John Yoo, at the Los Angeles Times, in August, "Filling Supreme Court vacancies isn't a good enough reason to vote for Trump."

Hat Tip: Instapundit.

Great 'Hacksaw Ridge' Review from David Edelstein

I've read at least three reviews of the movie, but Edelstein seems to cut closest to the essence.

At Vulture, "'Hacksaw Ridge' Is a Massive Achievement for Mel Gibson":

Say what you will about Mad Mel Gibson, he’s a driven, febrile artist, and there isn’t a second in his war film Hacksaw Ridge — not even the ones that should register as clichés — that doesn’t burn with his peculiar intensity. He has chosen exactly the right subject for himself. His hero is the Virginia-born Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), the first “conscientious objector” to receive the U.S. Medal of Honor based on lives he saved as a medic during the spring 1945 battle for Okinawa, one of the most hellish in the entire Pacific campaign. Doss had no problem with serving in the military. He longed to serve. But in insisting that, as a Seventh-day Adventist, he couldn’t carry a weapon, he flouted the central tenet of military cohesion: You protect your fellow soldiers and they protect you. He had to put himself in the middle of the inferno before the Army understood the nature of the protection he offered.

It’s the right subject for Gibson because violence is central to his work. The formula for the action films in which he starred was Make Mel Mad: hurt him, hurt his ­women, hurt his kids, and stand back. What’s clearer now is that violence — done by him and to him — is a form of self-obliteration. He is, for whatever reason, a man so brimming with self-disgust that he embraces violence as the straightest path to transcendence...

Keep reading. Also, "Mel Gibson's 'Hacksaw Ridge': Sadism and Pacifism Go to War (VIDEO)," and "Mel Gibson's a Different Person Now."