gehringer_2

Peaceful internally and peaceful on the street might be two different things. If Trump loses and we get cornered rat syndrome with him believing he can't stay out of jail, I don't think it's a particular stretch to believe he would try to incite civil unrest. He's already done it once. Huge difference in that LEO will be ready for it but that doesn't guarantee it might not get damn noisy. OTOH, maybe we can use it to our advantage. Tell the a few of the really deep red states in the Rockies that are most disconcerted that if don't want to accept the result that we're good if they secede. Make a free airfare to Cheyenne offer for any Trumper that wants to join them. Make them happy and solves the Senate and electoral college imbalance issues for the rest of us. 45 stars was decent looking flag in 1896.....

After the reams of discussion about how ossified US politics have become, It would certainly be bracing to find out that campaigns can still actually matter!

That's a fair critique but a lot different from alleging they are cooking the books. There are a lot of places where 'flash data' is presented because there are customers for the 1st look. But this is a place where your complaint probably goes to the political appointee level at Labor that has given BLS its mandates when to report.

Do a little research into the work BLS does an how they do it. Everyone always assumes stuff they aren't being asked to is easy for those other people doing it. Look at your prime case here. 250K was revised down to 225K. Either number was a lot more than was expected and either would have generated the same media narrative on its release. To make a reasonable argument of bad faith the revised number should have at least been below 150K, That would have been a fudge that would have affected the media play - not the 25K from 250 to 225. (which is a fricken 0.01% error!). Heck, if BLS was a bad faith actor they wouldn't revise numbers at all in an effort to try and make them better.

but this does take me right back to the issue I do get hot about, which is the need for this society to re-establish the demand for honesty and truth in public discourse. How do we expect to hold a civil servant to a standard of honesty if we elect a frickin' president for whom lying is second nature only to breathing? Democracy cannot function when public falsehood become normative - simply can't. It's really a bigger issue than the arguments about fascism because fascism is just the outcome of the acceptance of public falsehood. It the lagging indicator, not the leader.

cool as a cucumber here. Just used "get a grip" as an ordinary awareness idiom. "wake up and smell the coffee" if you find that more neutral.

The loss of the fairness doctrine was also driven in part by technology. The FCC didn't believe it had any authority to regulate cable TV so they never tried (nothing went over any public airway), so since the fairness doctrine didn't apply to cable, the broadcasters demanded Congress either extend the FCC's mandate there or give them an level playing field. The former never happened and the GOP's pre-disposition was to deregulate anyway.

If it doesn't make sense to you that it's really really hard to be accurate with small changes in huge numbers and the order magnitude issues associated with that there is nothing else I can tell you. The fact that a number is important has zero to do with whether it easy to get! And this really goes directly back to why a guy like Trump is do damn dangerous. You rag on BLS now when it's full of career civil servants with civil service protection against the political whims of the party in power. After Trump does away with Civil Service protection and make the whole executive bureaucracy subject to his every mood, you think you will ever be able to trust a government number at all? Get a grip.

Correct. "Low rate lock in" is absolutely freezing the resale market. But for decades we were building 2M+ new units of new housing every year - which was considered sort of the equilibrium requirement. That has fallen way off in the last decade or two. So sure - given the lack of new housing the stiffness in the used market just makes things worse.

For a good part of my lifetime, a 6.5% mortgage would have been considered a good deal, and most boomers probably paid at least that on average over the lifetime of their mortgages. The 15 yrs of very low rates sort of masked the fact that without abnormally low mortgage costs, housing prices were rising out of reach of too many people. So the issue for housing costs in the US is less mortgage cost than the price of housing. This is a multifaceted problem that has grown up slowly over the years and it touches on zoning, building codes, transportation policy, urban policy etc. It took a long time to develop and is going to take a while to unwind. To their credit, the Dems are at least talking like they realize housing costs are being driven by shortage, but it's going to take a lot more than down payment subsidies to fix it.

And near zero rates have even worse results in the corporate world, it removes investment discipline and a lot money gets put into stupid investments - pumps up bubbles that will only burst later, etc.

Total employment in the US is something like 160million people so to try to measure it down the 200K level is actually an amazing feat of accuracy. But we have people here immediately jumping to conspiracy assumptions when the measurement misses by about 0.1% of the total. You don't even get the gas you buy at the pump measured closer than 0.5%

Trump has 2 issues. Immigration - which exists because the GOP has refused every effort to pass new legislation for over a dozen years, and inflation, which was world wide and the from which the US has recovered faster and with more growth than any place else. There are lots of reasons why the general public doesn't understand how economics works, and every election that lack of understanding is an issue that can cost a good economic manager (e.g GHWB) an election unfairly. But there is nothing new about that.

this exactly. You can keep working a gig like that when you are old if you are in decent condition, but you have to keep working all the time to stay current like Scully did.

I take it as new terminology that shorthands a combination of pitch recognition and covering the K zone. It's the batter's version of controlling the zone. It does seem to be a shift though. When Hinch first got here it was all about 'getting good pitches to hit' -- the 'Shapes' stuff seems to be aimed more at learning to hit pitches that aren't so good (from the batter's perspective that is) but are going to be called strikes if you let them go.

Possibly - or maybe in a simple approval survey they aren't superimposing their estimates of who is likely or registered to vote, etc? But it still comes down to the fact that when you don't have a sampling methodology that can give you a sample you believe is closer to random than a 5% bias, you don't have a very good sampling methodology.

This. Some analysis I've - for instance someone (not Bonior) dove into the tabs of a 3 poll series from Quinipiac (not normally considered hacks) and found the actual difference in their reported results, which showed Trump gaining in the three successive surveys, was ALL in the sample weighting.

And more significantly, her approval rating is higher than trumps. No doubt she is going to lose some votes compared to Biden from misogyny, but she’s going to pick a lot because she is a woman and also because she is next gen (remember Haley’s proposition that whichever side didn’t run an old guy was going to win. )

Depends on how much you want to abstract. You certainly can define a communist economy in isolation from governance, but we do get "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" and the Party as the "Vanguard of the Proletariat" as the adjunct to creating the communist economy directly from Marx and Lenin so the tie has been there in practice. I heard a lecture by Kevin Rudd, ex-PM of Australia, who is also actually a China scholar and for example his take on Xi is that he has a very rigorous ideological reading of the requirements of Socialism and it's that ideological framework which is his justification for bringing the Party back into a more dominant role in management the Chinese economy ( and a more suppressive role in everything else!).

Right. BST pretty much used to say an American wouldn’t recognize a real socialist if one walked up and bit him.

I'm sure pitchers have gone over a 3rd time before, but never in a game I was watching until tonight. Didn't affect the outcome in the end but still a 'want to crawl out my skin' moment for Weaver.

the number of the counts is 3, and three shall be the number of the count. Neither shall it be 2. 4 is right out.

Romney can't help it - he is of the oligarchy.

Bingo. That is exactly the thing. This team can certainly get physical if they want to, but there it still no mental energy in their play - spark is a good word. When you watch great athletes you see when they know they can put their opponent on the ropes and take the game to them, and you don't see the Wings generate that fire on any kind of regular basis. At least a couple of years ago you'd see the Larkin/Bertuzzi/?? line just get in a grove and show up the other team. Now when Larkin is out there half the time his line can't even get possession to start anything. Damn depressing to watch.

this guy apparently created his own paper Seminary and the then gave himself a degree after not finishing anywhere real.