Grading my 2016 Predictions

Before I dig up my predictions from the beginning of the year to grade them, I can already predict this will be brutal.

Here is what I predicted on 1/1/16 (or as the Yurpians say, 1/1/16):

1. Obama will end the year with a higher approval rating than he has right now. Like last year's prediction #1, I will measure this using the Gallup Daily: Obama Job Approval number, which is really a three day average. Currently that number is at 44%. Yes, this is just like last year's prediction, except this time I will be right!

Right. Obama's approval is currently 55%.

2. Bernie Sanders will win the New Hampshire primary.

Right! See, I wasn't totally wrong about the presidential election race.

3. Sanders will drop out of the race without winning any other primary or caucuses.

Wrong. Really wrong.

4. Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic Party's candidate for president in the 2016 general election.

Right. This one seemed obvious, but obvious was wrong about a lot of other things in 2016.

5. Donald Trump will not win any more than five of the primaries or caucuses. For states that don't use a winner-take-all system, by "win" I mean get the most delegates. A plurality of delegates still counts as a win.

Wrong. Once again, really really wrong.

6. Marco Rubio will be the Republican candidate for president in the general election.

Wrong. In retrospect, it is embarrassing that I got caught up in the Rubmentum thing.

7. Donald Trump will not run as a third party candidate.

This one was based on an incorrect premise, but it still was right.

8. The Republican vice presidential candidate will not be anyone currently running for president.

Right again!

9. The Democratic vice presidential candidate will be someone named Castro.

Wrong. Man, I really was Mr. Prevailing Wisdom one year ago.

10. Hillary Clinton will win the general election.

Wrong. Wait, if I meant the popular vote, I would have been fucking right!!!! But I didn't mean the popular vote.

11. No new Justices will join the Supreme Court in 2016.

Even though I never foresaw the Merrick Garland debacle, I was still right.

12. There will be fewer than 90 detainees in the Guantanamo Bay by the end of 2016. (There are currently 107)

Right. There are currently 59. Luckily my prediction was for the end of 2016. Who knows how packed that place will be at the end of 2017?

13. There will be no government shutdown in 2016.

Right.

14. The Supreme Court will rule against the union in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, effectively making the whole country a "right to work" state for public employees.

So happy to be wrong about this one.

15. Russia will still be bombing in Syria and propping up the Assad government (and Assad will still be there to prop up).

Right.

16. At least one of the current leaders of the five former soviet stans will not be in power at the end of 2016. (Yes, I'm flopping back on my annual flip-flop prediction. This year I'm giving the opposite prediction of prediction #12 from 2013 and prediction #4 from 2015, but the same as prediction #8 of 2014. I guess it's an even-year/odd-year thing.)

Hey, this one finally paid off, I am fucking right!!!!!

17. Although the U.S. will continue to intervene in Iraq and maybe will start doing so in Syria with relatively small number of special forces, there will be no large deployment of land troops in either country in 2016. By "large deployment", I mean at least 1,000 soldiers.

Wrong, "nearly 5,000" in Iraq to assist in the re-taking of Mosul.

18. ISIS will end 2016 in control of less territory in Iraq and Syria than it holds at the beginning of 2016. (This is basically a repeat of prediction #10 from last year. But that prediction actually panned out! And I'm still convinced that the Islamic State is not a sustainable enterprise, no matter what the U.S. does about them)

Right. The lost 16% of its territory in Syria/Iraq in the first nine months of 2016. While the losses seem to have stabilized and they did win back Palmyra, I think it is pretty clear it was a net loss.

19. A member of ISIS will be brought before a court in 2016 for crimes against humanity.

Wrong. This looks even less likely as one big development in 2016 is that the International Criminal Court is slowly coming apart.

20. Iran and the P5+1 will still be abiding by the terms of the Iran nuclear deal reached in 2015, but there will be no major improvement in relations between Iran and the U.S. in 2016.

I'm going to count this as right.

21. United Russia (Putin's political party) will increase its share of seats in the Russian Duma in the 2016 legislative elections. (It currently holds 238 seats)

Right. United Russia now has 343 seats out of 450.

22. The Democrats will retake the U.S. Senate in the November elections, and will gain a small number of seats in the House, that that chamber will remain in GOP control.

I'm going to count this half-right. The Democrats did not retake the senate, but they did gain a small number of seats in the House (6 total) and the House stayed under GOP control.

23. Russia will not intervene militarily in any other country, other than continuing with its already-existing intervention in Ukraine and Syria , in 2016. By "intervene militarily" I mean any ground forces operation (whether acknowledged or not, what Russia did in Eastern Ukraine would count). A pin-prick type strike would not count.

Right. Russia is still involved in Syria and Ukraine, but they have not sent ground forces anywhere else.

24. No other country will agree to join the Eurasian Economic Union in 2016 (that is, no more countries will agree to join beyond the current 5 members: Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan.

Right. No other country has joined since 2015. Now that Uzbekistan is (at least nominally) under new management, there is a chance that country might be interested in joining at some point in the future. But Karimov died too late in 2016 to make that happen this year.

25. The Tenge will end 2016 less valuable (compared to the U.S. Dollar) than it is now. Put another way, currently, $1USD equals 341.588 KZT. The amount of Tenge one can buy for a dollar at year's end will be higher than 341.588.

Wrong. $1USD equals 333.060 KZT.

26. Congress will not confirm any ambassador to Cuba in 2016.

Right. Obama appointed an ambassador and Senate Republicans immediately announced that they would make zero effort to get him confirmed.

27. More States will adopt the Medicaid expansion under the ACA by the end of 2016 than have currently adopted it. (By my count, 30 states + D.C. have expanded Medicaid and 20 states have not expanded. Both "Not Adopting the Medicaid Expansion at this Time" and "Adoption of the Medicaid Expansion under Discussion" from this list count as states that have not expanded.)

Right, but just barely. Using that same list I cited at the beginning of the year, 31 states, + D.C. have expanded and 19 states have not.

THE TALLY:

I got 17.5 right and 9.5 wrong, not nearly as horrible as I expected when I started writing this post.  Also, that is 64.8 15% correct, which is better than I did last year. In fact, it is pretty comparable to how I have done in a bunch of other years (like 2009, 2013, and 2014). Check out these past scores:

2008: 20 right to 4 wrong (83.333%)
2009: 14.5 right to 7.5 wrong. (65.909%)

2010: (none because Kazakhstan)

2011: 15.5 right to 6.5 wrong (70.455%)

2012: 15.5 right to 6.5 wrong again (70.455% again)

2013: 15.5 right to 9.5 wrong (62.000%)

2014: 17 right to 9 wrong (65.385%)

2015: 11.5 right to 13.5 wrong (46.000%)

So 2016 turned out to be a fairly normal year in terms of my success rate. The real outlier was last year. I do feel like I was worse at predicting stuff this year than usual. But I guess I should focus on Russian Dumas and dead Central Asian leaders to get more of a perspective.

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THIS YEAR ONLY BONUS PREDICTION GRADING!

Commentator Joseph Spiezer's predictions are graded as follows:

1. Chicago will be celebrating it first pennant since 1945, but the Phillies and Eagles will exceed Vegas predictions.

Holy shit, he got that Chicago prediction right. (I don't know anything about sportsball, but I did live in Chicago for 4-7 years (depending how you measure it) so I was aware that the Cubs winning is a harbinger of the apocalypse).

2 Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee and will take federal funding for his campaign (he has less money than he wants you to think)

Half-right. Trump was the nominee but (I believe) he did not take federal funding.

3 Hillary will crush Trump in the general election

Wrong.

4. The stock market will begin to recover later in the year, unless I am wrong about the election and Trump wins in which case the stock market will completely tank.

This one can be interpreted different ways. The market did recover, but Trump won the election and, despite the immediate post election wobbling, the market did not "completely tank." I guess I have to call this half right.

5. By August, Russia will realize it cannot defeat ISIS unless it sends in ground troops or removes Assad. Assad will go.

Wrong.

6. Uncharacteristic weather will play havoc with the commodities markets.

I think this is also wrong, but I am happy to see if anyone wants to show me a counter-example.

7. Something completely unforeseen will occur.

Right, because of course it was going to be right. But still, this was a year for unforeseen shit!

That's three right (actually 2 right + two half-right) and four wrong (3 wrong + the 2 half-wrong halves of the half-rights), or 42.857% That's worse than I did in 2016, but he made a lot fewer predictions, so one wrong guess adds a lot to the percentage.

Settlement yargh!

Aside from the general idea that the I-P conflict makes people crazy, I don't get why we have had a multi-day temper-tantrum over the U.S.'s decision not to veto the security council resolution which condemned the growth of settlements in the West Bank. The resolution doesn't say anything that hasn't been the official U.S. position on settlements in the occupied territories for decades. The resolution also doesn't have any enforcement mechanism. It doesn't call for the use of force or refer anyone to the International Criminal Court. It simply is a statement about Israeli's settlement practices, one that happens to articulate a view of those settlements that has long been widely shared across the world. Also, the vote was 14 to 0 with one abstention. The U.S. is the only country that did not vote for it! Why is it getting so much ire? Four other countries could have vetoed the resolution. Another ten could have voted against it but voted for it instead.

While it is true that in the past the U.S. made a habit of vetoing "anti-Israeli" security council resolutions, even when those resolutions reflected official U.S. policy. But you can't read the decision to abstain to this particular vote as a signaled change in U.S. policy to a more critical stance towards Israel. Everyone knows that is not what the Trump administration will do. This vote is not a harbinger of anything. It's just a signal that President Obama is done doing dumb things to signal blind support of Israel. But Obama as president is pretty much done, It doesn't mean anything for the long term.

So why has the freakout continue for this long, even over a holiday weekend? Is Netanyahu driving this just because it is his last chance to take some shots at Obama? The settlements are a real issue. But the screams that followed just seems increasingly petty and stupid.

Voxy

I know the site has its critics, but I mostly like Vox. It does have a distinctive flavor that is ripe for mockery. This, for example, is a Vox article.

I hear today is some kind of holiday

Trump's tweets are a threat to our national security

Here is the article. And here is today's example.

Tune in tomorrow for what will no doubt be another, even more terrifying, example.

Not sure what to think

Should I be happy that Trump's fixation on appearances saved the country from a terrible Secretary of State, or terrified by how mind-bogglingly stupid Donald Trump apparently is.

Russia as seen by the Turks

I'm not trying to make a joke about this (it isn't funny), but I do think it is symbolically significant that the Russian ambassador was assassinated because of Russia's role in Syria at an exhibit called "Russia as Seen by the Turks."

D'oh!

I guess I forgot to do a Kazakhstan Independence Day post on Friday. There are a handful of days each year that I have developed a tradition of posting about. I don't calendar them or anything, but they are all days I know I will remember on my own. But because I don't post about all of my personal holidays, just some of them, it is not surprising that I will sometimes forget to do the post. I really should calendar them. It's a small miracle that I ever remember to post about any of them.

Anyway, I totally remembered KZ Independence Day (the Kazakhstani flag is still flying in front of my house as it has since Friday), I just forgot to Rubber Hose it. Happy quarter century, Kazakhstan! (Maybe not so happy thirtieth anniversary of the Zheltoqsan incident.) Happy seven years from the day we left for KZ and six years from the day we came back! Or at least happy three days late.

Previously on Каучуктан жасалған Құбыршек: -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Happy electoral college vote day!

My prediction is there will be 2 Republicans who switch their vote (they guy who published the op-ed saying he would, and maybe one other person). There might be a handful of misguided Clinton electors who vote for Kasich, in the mistaken belief that there will be more faithless Republican electors. But the only thing that will accomplish is make Clinton's electoral loss a bit worse.

Real news is more to blame than fake news

Exactly.

For all their post-election "how-did-this-happen" questions, the media has largely ignored the fact that it completely refused to cover the Clinton campaign through anything but a lense of scandal. That's just how they treat the Clintons, and it's how they always treat the Clintons.

In a close presidential election, you can argue that almost anything changed the outcome, because almost anything that would have bumped up Clinton's numbers in a few key places would have. So everyone is free to pick their favorite issue with what happened: it was the Russian hacks, it was Comey, it was because Clinton didn't focus on the upper-Midwest, it was some failure with Clinton's GOTV efforts, it was fake news, it was Jill Stein, etc. etc. etc. You can argue for any of them, and maybe they all are right (that is, if  any one of those things had been different maybe the outcome would have been different too). Monday morning quarterbacking is fun!

But from where I sit, the biggest reason that Clinton lost was the unrelentingly bad coverage she received from start to finish. It ruled her out as an alternative for people who had serious reservations about Trump. Yes, I'm Monday morning quarterbacking like everyone else. But I'm fucking right, and all your other theories are crap.

why are people excited about this?

Of all the unprecedented things that the Trump administration is doing/will do, the one that bothers me the least is the fact that his daughter will have a prominent role in his administration. Sure, Ivanka brings with her some extra conflicts of interest, which are a real issue. But Ivanka's conflicts just are a subset of her father's massive conflicts. Ivanka herself doesn't bring any unique new problem to the administration. Her role really isn't the issue.

The logistics

I'm all for giving electors a national security briefing before they vote, but as a practical matter is that proposal something that can be done before Monday's vote? How do you set up a confidential briefing for 538 people scattered across the U.S. and to do all of them in the next four days? How many people do the security agencies have who are qualified to give these kinds of briefings? In a normal course of events, the most these agencies would be expected to deliver three of these briefings at around the same time, which is what they would do during a late presidential campaign when both major party candidates are entitled to a briefing, as well as the sitting president. It would be no simple matter for them to suddenly give each elector a temporary security clearance, then schedule, and then deliver an individual briefings for 180 times as many people in such a short period of time.

I would guess that if whoever is in charge of these things had to do it, they would be able to pull it off, but this would be a real logistical challenge.

Delayed

I always thought it was odd that Trump planned to explain his efforts to avoid conflicts of interest between his business dealings and his presidency in the days before the electoral college votes. The odds that he would lose the elector college vote because of faithless electors were always low (by "always" I mean since the evening of November 8), but those minuscule odds would only increase if he delivered a clearly inadequate and widely panned bullshit solution to his kleptocracy problem in the days leading up to that vote.

I guess someone showed him a calendar. So now his fake solution will be presented next month  when it is completely and thoroughly too late for anyone to do anything about it.

Lesson for the new era

Our President elect is a shameless lying grifter. While he can be manipulated by using his vanity and desire to be popular, he gets defensive when directly criticized and is not going to be pressured into doing anything he does not want to do.

But that's not true of other members of his party. In the past few days, Mitch McConnell has been savaged by reports that he covered up the scope of Russian manipulation of the U.S. election prior to the vote. If you look at comments on social media over the past few days, any time McConnell's name is mentioned, there are calls of "traitor" and demands he be prosecuted for selling out our country. (See e.g. the recent comments here) It is made worse by the fact that McConnell's wife was offered a cabinet position. After a weekend of criticism, McConnell broke with the president-election and suddenly backs a bipartisan investigation into Russian interference with the Presidential election.

While Trump is shameless and may be immune to the normal methods that can be used to pressure a politician, we can focus the heat on Republicans in Congress if we want to limit the damage wrought by a Trump administration.

Recount > Count?

Here's the thing I have always wondered about recounts: why are they presumed to be better than the original count? If you count one time and get result A, then count again and get result B, how do you know which to believe? Is there a third tie-breaking count? (What if the tie-breaker produces a third result instead of validating either of the prior counts?) Maybe the recount is done in a way to make it more rigorous than the first count, thus giving it more credibility?

This is not about the current recounts in PA, MI, and WI, but about recounts in general. I am not criticizing those recounts or the concept of recounts. I just don't have the answers to the above questions.

Will Trump be able to tweet after he is sworn in?

Others might not remember this but after Obama was elected there were a bunch of stories about how the Secret Service forced him to give up his iPhone because it was not secure enough. Obama is still using a Blackberry (in 2016!) which has been "stripped of most of its functionality to make way for extra layers of encryption." What functions were stripped are not clear, it is not even certain if Obama's phone can text or do email.

Assuming Trump lets the Secret Service tell him what phone he can use, would Trump's new presidential super-secure phone have Twitter? I would bet no. Even if there is a secure way to let him tweet (which I doubt, because tweets all go through a private company's server that the secret service can't control), they might just want to leave the Twitter app out of the package anyway, to stop Minority President Dumpster Fire from doing another stupid thing on Twitter.

Overwhelming his opposition with shit appointees

Has Trump named any non-disastrous nominees for his cabinet and non-cabinet advisers? If any other president-elect had named only one of these people, the Democrats would be working their ass off to find some GOP defectors and use the public's pressure to avoid confirmation. Maybe the battle wouldn't be won, but at least there would be a battle. And the battle itself would have some value, allowing the Democrats to stake out their territory in the new Trump era. By having every appointee he names an out of the mainstream steaming pile of shit, how can the opposition focus its attention on any single dreadful appointee during the confirmation fight?

This overwhelm the opposition with too much stuff to react to seems to be Trump's M.O. Many noted during the election campaign that while Trump had more scandals that you could count (the Trump U. fraud suit, his campaign's ties to Putin, his abuse of his charitable foundation, his refusal to disclose any significant medical or financial information about himself, all of the allegations of sexual assault, etc. etc. etc.), Clinton had only a handful of (largely bullshit IMHO) scandals. Because it was easier to just focus on THE EMAILS, Clinton got a lot more negative scandal-related coverage that Trump even though Trump objectively had a lot more scandals.

I don't know if it is intentional, but Trump's decision to name fringe and rightwing radicals for almost every position in his cabinet and as his advisers means that the opposition is not likely to be able to mount concentrated resistance to any of them.

Well Done Michiganders!

As one of the blue states that switched to red for Trump, you must be really proud of yourself.

The key question to understanding anything that Trump does: what's in it for him?

I don't know why so many people are puzzling over why Trump would abruptly announce that he will cancel the Boeing contract for two new Air Force One planes. Two key details give me enough reason to figure it out:

1. The new planes will not delivered until 2023. Even if we assume there are no further delays,  Minority President Trump would not be able to ride in the planes unless he is elected to a second term, and even in that case, it would only be in the final year of his term.

2. If some new shiny Air Force One planes go into service, Trump will be pressured to use those planes instead of his personal gold-plated jets. When he uses his personal jets, he can bill the Secret Service for millions of dollars. If he uses one of those new Air Force One planes, the Secret Service wouldn't have to pay him anything.

UPDATE: JMM floats another theory for why Trump turned on the Boeing deal. Marshall suggests that it might have been retaliation for the CEO's criticism of Trump. That wouldn't surprise me either. And if true, it would be an example of Trump abusing his power before he is even in power. Welcome to the United State of Banana Republic!

Trump meets with Gore

I like Al Gore, I really do. And I'm glad that Trump met with him to discuss climate change, because maybe Al will get Trump to take the problem at least a little bit seriously.

But the meeting also seems silly. Al Gore really isn't a politician anymore, that's not why Trump met with him. He met with Al because Gore is a celebrity. There are plenty of experts on climate change he could have met with, scientists, for example. But those people are not famous, so they are not the kind of people that Trump will meet.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means

Uh Politico, "the Garland treatment" would not be putting Trump's appointees "through a grinding confirmation process."

If Republicans had done that with Garland, they would have been doing their job. It's fun to watch Tiger Beat on the Potomac spin the precedent-breaking Garland matter into just another rough confirmation fight.

Maybe after Mirziyaev

I once thought there was once a chance that after Uzbekistan's first and only president died, maybe the country would open itself up a bit to real democracy. Okay, it was a very small chance. Uz has effectively been governed by a clique of influential power-brokers in various regional clans, especially as Islam Karimov's health declined in the last few years. But I still had a little bit of hope that something might get a little better, maybe the most populous Central Asian country could at least have a competitive election for the first post-Karimov leader? That seemed like it should have been a possibility.

So much for that.

American white supremacists are ignorant about Russia (shocking, I know)

White supremacists who revere Putin seem to be unaware of just how diverse a country Russia is. Putting aside racial diversity (do they really think the locals in the Russian far East are white people right up to the Chinese, Mongolian and Korean border?) Islam is an officially recognized religion in Russia and has the second largest number of adherents in the country after Orthodox Christianity. Putin personally has made plenty of statements that are supportive of Islam, and he has even effectively allowed strict Gulf-Arab style Shariah to be imposed within Russian territory. The far-right have spread false stories about alleged shariah enclaves in the U.S. where American law does not apply, but Chechnya is the real deal.

Sure, Putin is into Russian nationalism. But it is a mistake to confuse that with White Christian nationalism. Lots of Russian citizens are not white and not Christian. (Also, the Richard Spencer quote in the Times piece, that there is "'an understanding' between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin [that] might bring together Slavic and American Caucasians and eventually 'foretell a unified white world.'" is ironic, because to Mr. Putin, "Caucasians" are not slavic, not predominantly Christian, and not "white").

what will the world do with him?

I'm not sure whether Donald Trump will inadvertently cause some horrible international crisis, or if foreign leaders will just conclude that the U.S. is led by an ignorant moron and will decide to not read anything into each time he stumbles blindly into some international minefield.

Trump is fighting this because he is a baby, not because there is any real reason for him to worry

Trump and his allies are fighting the recount efforts in MI, WI, and PA. It's a fair question to ask why. Although I think it is a mistake to take Trump's actions as a sign that the election was "hacked" or that the recount has much of a chance of changing the election result. I think it's a lot more likely that Trump is getting his people to fight this because he is personally insulted by the recount effort and so he is lashing back, just as he does whenever he thinks anyone insults him.

انشالله للملحدين

I have used inshallah in casual emails. I didn't realize that makes me a hipster. I don't believe in any god that might will anything, but I think the word (actually, it is a portmanteau of three words) does seem to convey something different than the word "hopefully." From my atheist lips (or nonbelieving typing fingers) I think it implies that the hoped-for thing probably won't happen.

President Disaster

The only way for Trump to not have countless conflicts of interest that violate the constitution, bring a new level of corruption to the U.S., and pose a new security risk is if he liquidates his business empire, puts the proceeds into a blind trust, and stops using his name as a brand. In other words, to avoid a bunch of serious messes, he would have to completely end the Trump business as he has known it for his entire adult life.

Trump will never do that. No one can make him do that. We are fucked.

A master at taking credit

I know Putin will get the credit for this, but it is hard for me to see how this was a major accomplishment. Low oil prices are killing the budgets of all OPEC members, as well as non-OPEC states that are oil production dependent, like Russia.

Sure, Saudi Arabia and Iran hate each other and are fighting 1 or 2 proxy wars with each other (in Yemen and also, arguably, Syria/Iraq), but on the question of oil prices their economic interests are in complete alignment. Both countries need oil prices to go up for their budgets to work. It doesn't take a diplomatic genius to get two countries to do what is in their clear interest to do.

Incentivizing corporate blackmail

Bernie is right. The Trump-Pence carrier deal is not a demonstration that the new administration can keep jobs in the U.S., it is notice to corporate america that if they threaten to move jobs abroad they can get all kinds of goodies from the government. Of course State and Local governments have been doing that stuff for years, but now we have a guy on top of the federal government willing to cut a new deal of corporate welfare for any company that is willing to engage in a little American jobs blackmail.

Invest in Tunisia

It would really be in our government's interest to invest heavily in Tunisia right now. Tunisia is the only Arab Spring success, in the sense that it replaced a dictatorship with a democracy. And a real democracy too, as Tunisia has already had a peaceful transfer of power between rival parties after an election, without any foreign occupying power there to make it happen. They really did it themselves. The country's progress in the last five years is really fragile, with its economy in tatters and being a small country right next door to the basket case that is Libya.

During the Bush years conservatives liked to talk about how having a successful Arab democracy would improve the Middle East by providing a positive example to other countries in the region. At the time, they were talking about the hapless dream about Iraq. But why wouldn't that same argument apply to the actual success of Tunisia? Just a few years ago, North Africa was viewed as so critical to American interest to warrant military intervention in Libya. Surely, our interests extend to not blowing shit up and killing people in the region.

I doubt if the Trump Administration would be inclined to help Tunisia. Trump himself probably doesn't know anything about the country, and his advisers on foreign affairs who might otherwise be able to talk him into doing something positive are a bunch of Islamaphobes who only see the Arab world as a military problem. But I would love it if our new allegedly business savvy administration proves me wrong and sees Tunisia as an real opportunity to make things a tiny bit better.

why is it never "even Singapore"?

The "even Kazakhstan" phenomenon makes an appearance down under.

You can't really believe that America is awesome without having some sympathy for immigrants

I don't really get the reason for any hostility towards immigrants by people who believe in the greatness of America. If you really thought this country was so awesome, why wouldn't other people want to come here? Isn't that what you (an "America, Fuck Yeah!" person) would do if you had the misfortune of being born somewhere else? Why should coming here be a crime?¹

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1- Yeah I know that breaking immigration law is a civil, not criminal, offense. But I don't know how many times I have talked immigration with a right-wing nut job when they have relied on the idea that the undocumented are per se criminals.

Citizenship is the bigger issue

I actually think that the worst part of Trump's "flag burning" tweet was his statement that the penalty for flag burning should be the loss of American citizenship. Plenty of countries outlaw the burning of their national flag, including much of the so-"free world." I agree with that flag burning is protected speech under the First Amendment, but that ruling came down when I was in college. As wrong as penalizing flag burning may be IMHO, it wasn't that long ago that flag burning was illegal here.

What is much more shocking is the idea that Trump wants to strip citizenship from people because of their political protests. That really is the stuff of dictatorships. And sets a really bad precedent of political rights as a privilege that can be lost.

Even though flag burning has been legal in the U.S. for almost my entire adult life, flag burning is very rare. If anything, flag burning is probably more popular when it is illegal--it certainly makes more of a statement when it is against the law. I have seen a flag burning exactly once in my life, and it was in Damascus, not the U.S. And really it was just a pillow case that was decorated to look like a U.S. flag with a marker. I bet it didn't even have the right number of stars. (See the post I wrote at the time)

Of recounts and faithless electors

I have no problem with the recount efforts in WI, MI and PA. It's silly for people to act like this is some kind of underhanded way to overturn the election. The recount procedures are part of the electoral process. Assuming everyone follows the rules, there is no problem with Jill Stein requesting a recount (she was on the ballot and she is entitled to, even if her vote total was minuscule), and there is no problem with the Clinton campaign cooperating with the recount to ensure that the recount is fair.

That said, I have almost no expectation that the recount will deny Trump the presidency. There's no actual evidence of fraud so far. In order to change the result, the recounts in all three states would have to flip the result to the other candidate. Getting even one state to flip would be unprecedented. The odds of all three, especially having Clinton  bridge the 68,236 vote gap between the candidates in PA, is almost out of the question.

Unless the results were "hacked." But how would that work? I don't know how MI and WI handle their voting, but I was an attorney-poll watcher on election day in PA and I just don't see how anyone would pull off a hack of the election in this state if they wanted to do it. The voting machines in my area are purely electronic, meaning that they did not give a paper receipt. Instead, everyone votes electronically by pushing buttons, and then at the end of the day the machine spits out a tally (which is a paper receipt). The machines is not hooked up to the Internet, or any network. It's just plugged in. So to "hack" the machine, someone would have to install malicious code in the machine prior to the election so that it would record the votes wrong. The code would have to be undetectable to the mechanic assigned to the machine on election day (I personally watched the inspection of the machines in my precinct the morning of November 8, and I personally confirmed that each machine started the day with a vote tally of zero). Except that one machine wouldn't change the results of the election, Our precinct alone had two machines for a couple of hundred voters. To alter the tally of the 6 million votes cast in this state, someone would need to sneak in and install malicious code on thousands of machines scattered across the commonwealth. The change would also have to be carefully calculated so that it doesn't create any weird data blips, like one machine in one precinct recording a ton of Trump votes while the other one in the same precinct does not, or that machines in neighboring precincts who have similar voting histories don't record wildly divergent results. Any of those things would be easy to see if they happened. I have not seen any reports of those tell-tail signs. Without any evidence, the charge that the election was "hacked" is just baseless and irresponsible.

Of course, I could be wrong. I certainly have been wrong before. By all means let people recount. But the hopes that a recount will deliver the presidency to Clinton are pretty misplaced.

Actually, the only real (albeit really remote) chance of changing the result is by getting enough electors to go faithless and switch their Trump vote to Clinton. Again, I highly doubt this will happen. Electors are by design party loyalists. A lot of party loyalists really do not like Trump, but, if the recent election demonstrated nothing else, they really do not like Clinton even more. Any elector who feels he or she cannot in good conscience vote for Trump is more likely to be like this guy and resign, than cast a faithless vote for Clinton. Still, as Trump disavows all his campaign promises one-by-one, and more and more news breaks of his endless conflicts of interest, I guess there is an outside chance that between now and mid-December the shit could really hit the fan causing a deep and widespread revulsion to the guy.

I don't think faithless electors will deliver the Presidency to Clinton, but I do think there is a better chance of that then the recount changing the result.

It is also worth noting that if that long-shot happens and a bunch of electors break their pledge and deny Trump the presidency, there will be a shit-storm of epic proportions. Until recently that is why I was against using the electoral college to deny Trump the presidency. We would pay the cost of a constitutional crisis just to avoid a bad president. But since Trump has become president-elect, started to name his alt-rightist appointees and business cronies to positions of power, and has demonstrated his willingness to simply ignore constitutional provisions like the emoluments clause, I think we are heading for a constitutional crisis either way. So now I'm all for denying Trump the presidency in the electoral college. I just don't think it is going to happen.

47

Woo-hoo, I'm a safe prime!!!!!

Previously: 46, 45, 44, 43, 42, [41], 40, 39, 38, 37, 36, 35, 34

after years of conditioning by Fox News

The Russian government may have tried to promote fake pro-Trump/anti-Clinton stories, but a lot of fake stories took off just because conservatives were less likely to question stories that confirmed their biases.

If there's one thing Trump can't tolerate, it's intelligence

Oy.

The Clown President

Trump tweets since election

- Blasting media: 12
- Blasting 'Hamilton': 4
- Blasting people committing hate crimes in his name: 0

— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) November 22, 2016

The wrong people doing protest votes

This is idiotic. If you're going to go faithless to undermine the electoral college, and presumably supporting a move to a national popular vote, then electors should throw their support to the winner of the popular vote, Hillary Clinton. An elector pledged to Clinton but casting a vote for someone else (Bernie or whoever) won't stop Trump from getting a majority in the electoral college, or cast any doubt on his legitimacy.

Electors could use their EC vote to make a statement. But to do that in this election Republican electors would have to be the ones to go faithless.

The issues facing this country

I find it really strange that Trump thinks these are the issues that a president elect should comment on. Maybe I'm not surprised. Those are the kind of "issues" that get the attention of our political reporters. Questions of policy, like how to address rising health care costs while increasing health care access, are not something they care much about. But if a sketch comedy show did a skit about a public figure, why that demands coverage!

Second Stamp Day

Happy 6th anniversary of Second Stamp Day!

Too racist to be a federal judge, perfect to be Trump's Attorney General

Of course, Session's judicial nomination was rejected by the Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee in the 1980s. Back then, Republicans were willing to reject someone for racism, um, excuse me, I mean being "racially charged." There is no realistic chance of him being rejected by the GOP-controlled Senate today. He is their colleague!

I did not think it would be Ted Cruz. Cruz was willing to snub Trump after he clinched the nomination. Trump won't want anyone who shows that kind of independence.

(Title ripped off from my friend SU's Facebook post)

Unintended consequence of a Trump presidency

A rise in college tuition.

How will that work? U.S. colleges and universities don't give financial aid to foreign students. Unlike most American students, foreign students pay the full ticket price (sometimes with the help of their government). One of the reasons that U.S. colleges and universities work so hard to recruit foreign students is because they get more money for those students. If foreign students start avoiding U.S. institutions, those institutions will have to make up the shortfall. And they will probably do that by raising tuition.

I expect the Trump presidency, especially its (both perceived and real) hostility to foreigners, is going to have all kinds of unintended consequences.

Even if they have good intentions...

I have mixed feelings about the ploy to get enough electors to go faithless to deny Trump the presidency, but it should be obvious that doxing them is not the way to go about it.

No, I mean Tim, not Paul

I don't know much about this guy and have no real opinion if he would be better or worse than Nancy Pelosi. But it will be really confusing if both parties in the House are led by a guy named "Ryan."

This is Not Normal

Joshua Foust's list from two days ago with yesterday's update.

See also Ryan Lizza at the NYer.

Credit where credit is due

I have been to several autocratic countries. But when I was in Kazakhstan, I thought it was to that country's credit that the banknotes featured images of buildings and famous Kazakhs from the past and not its current president.

Come December 1, so much for that.

Filibusted

I don't buy this argument. For one thing, reconciliation only works if the CBO projects that the proposed legislation will not increase the deficit after next ten years. There are tricks you can use to get around that (that's why the Bush tax cut had a sunset clause, making it expire one day short of its tenth anniversary), but the bottom line is that most the Republicans' plans, like repealing Obamacare, would increase the deficit. So they won't be able to use it for most of their signature issues.

I do think there is one small chance that the filibuster will survive (but only for legislation. If they keep the filibuster, the Republicans will extend current exception to the filibuster rule for judicial and executive appointments to include prohibiting the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees). That scenario is if a significant number of key Republicans in the Senate are secretly scared of Trump's agenda but are too cowardly to say so in public. Maintaining the filibuster for legislation would be a way to enable the opposition to gum up the works on any really radical changes under the guise of maintaining Senatorial traditions.

It's only a small chance IMHO because I don't see that much secret GOP scaredy cat. But maybe I just don't see them because they are good at being secret.

Disarray!

Poor Chris Christie, he jeopardized any lingering credibility he had by becoming Trump's lap dog during the primary. He didn't get the Vice Presidential slot as he hoped, but he carried on. The Republican who used to decry Islamophobia stayed with Trump even as he was mocked for it, with the promise that if Trump's long-shot presidential bid paid off, he would be rewarded for his loyalty. Last week, it looked like his bet paid off. But this week, he is purged, ironically for "disloyalty." Even anyone who Christie brought into the Trump team was fired too, because they were associated with the persona non grata of the moment and that's how autocrats purge.

Unless you are related to Trump or are married to someone who is (and if the latter, you'd better stay married!), I would not assume that loyalty will necessarily be rewarded.

Nondisclosure agreements

WTF!

I'm not sure if that would be legal, but if it is it should not be. Federal employees, even high level people in a president's administration, work for the people, not just the president. While the president should be able to expect confidentiality on his private talks about sensitive topics, those talks are already legally protected. All a NDA would add is to subject federal employees to legal liability for telling the world about matters that are not already protected by law.

You want an impossible to actually pass idea for electoral reform, I got an impossible to actually pass idea for electoral reform!

Since the election, a bunch of friends have mused about various electoral reforms, like abolishing the electoral college (a good idea, but I doubt it will happen) and compulsory voting like they have in Australia (ditto). One reform that is just as unlikely to happen but that no one is talking about because I just thought of it myself is this:

Instead of using population as determined by the census to apportion Congressional representation, why not use voter turnout. The more people who vote in a state, the more representatives in Congress they get. One big effect that would have is it would undermine the motivation for voter suppression. If a state makes it harder for its citizens to vote, it may end up costing itself seats in Congress, which also reduce the states electoral vote. On the other hand, people not eligible to vote (children, non-citizens, etc) would be completely unrepresented (currently, the number of Congress-critters a state gets is based on the number of humans, whether or not they can vote), but it would motivate the powers-that-be in a state to be on the side of getting all its eligible voters to the polls.

Of course, like all the other electoral reforms there are clear winners and losers, which makes it effectively impossible to ever enact. The current Republican party would have zero incentive to sign on to that kind of reform, and because the role of the census is enshrined in the constitution, it would take a constitutional amendment to pass, making it that much harder and unlikely.

Still, if you ever hear anyone floating a proposal like this, remember, you heard it here first.

The other winner in the presidential election

Pretty soon George W. Bush won't top any lists of America's Worst Presidents.

Abolishing the Electoral College will be a partisan issue

Everyone pretends to hate the electoral college. There's really no way to defend it in the modern era, other than saying "it's not what I would have done if I was drafting the constitution today, but its what we've got and we are stuck with it." But the reality is that there have been five instances where a president has been elected while losing the popular vote, and the last four times it happened the beneficiary of the electoral college who lost the popular vote was a Republican. (The first time it happened was in 1824, before the Republican Party existed). Demographic trends that give minorities an increasing share of the electorate are going to give Republicans less of a reason to get rid of the EC. The fact that the fastest growing minority happens to live in the wrong places to give the Democrats the boost proportionate to their numbers is a built in advantage for the GOP that they will not just give up.

It really should not be surprising that the National Popular Vote bill has only been passed in blue states. The effort won't be able to reach its 270 EV threshold unless it gets some red states, including quite a few that are currently solidly in control by Republicans. And Republicans have no incentive to let that happen.

Making the civil service into an unpaid internship

Once Trump of the federal bureaucracy, I wonder if federal employees will be paid.

Land of the newly wed and nearly dead

Trump's surge in Florida returns was the first inkling that he would win on election night. And while, he probably would have won without Florida, I can't say for certain that would be true even though it's three days later because MI and NH still have not been called. So Florida really was a key to Trump's victory.

So I guess it's fitting that a Trump victory will hasten that state's descent into the sea. (Not that I'm wishing that on Floridians, no matter how they voted)

We can't even trust a professional huckster!

In these dark times, my hopes all rest on the fact that Trump is a big fraud and will keep on frauding all of his worst election promises.

UPDATE: And if you click the above link now, you will see that the Muslim ban pledge is back.

It did change everything

Looking at this site a lot of my posts from the really recent past look really dumb. For example.

Two schools of thought about what a Trump presidency will be

There seems to be two schools of thought about what a Trump Presidency will look like among the people I work with. One school views Trump as just another Republican. Sure, he may have said crazy stuff during the campaign and openly pandered to the bigoted fringe, but, this first school claims, when it gets to governing either Trump will reveal that that campaign stuff was just a shtick and he is really just a regular Republican or he has no real core values and will let the regular Republicans around him call all the policy shots. The second school takes that crazy campaign stuff more at face value and views Trump as something different, and a lot more dangerous and ugly, than a regular Republican.

People in the first school keep trying to reassure me that the Trump presidency will be a lot like the W Bush presidency, albeit with a clownish reality star as the office's chief spokesperson. The W Bush years sucked. They are the reason this blog exists. In those years we had the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, two wars, and an economic collapse at the end. But we survived, and that mess paved the way for Obama. I know I can survive another 1 or 2 terms of W Bush because I already have.

But the second school says this is something much darker. Trump is something more like a 1930s-era fascist, or a modern authoritarian like Berlusconi or Erdogan. He isn't going to just govern conservatively and make a lot of bad (IMHO) policy decisions, this school claims that Trump will break the norms that have held this country together since the mid-20th century and unleash hateful and undemocratic forces on the country.

I'm scare shitless that the second school is right, but I am open to the possibility that school number one is actually correct. Please tell me that school number one is correct.

The Day After

Yeah, I sure looked like a fucking genius.

What a nightmare.

Electoral prediction in which I crib off of all these other election prediction sites that use actual statistics and shit so I can seem like a fucking genius when someone else did all the hard work

My final prediction is that the electoral vote will be 347-191.

Okay, okay, before you dismiss this map as just reflecting my own biases of what I think should happen, note that I did not give AZ or GA to Clinton, nor did I have McMullin win UT (all three of which I really do wish would happen). My methodology in making this map is pretty simple. For all but one of the states that people call swingers (AZ, CO, FL, GA, IA, MI, NC, NH, NV, OH, see below re: PA), I pulled up a chart of the polling overages/electoral prediction over the past few months or so. If Clinton was ahead most of the time (even if she is not right now), I gave it to her. If Trump was ahead most of the time (even if he is not right now), I gave it to him. The philosophy behind that is my sense that there are no real swing voters in this election and that everyone really made up their minds months ago. Poll fluctuations are just more about how much people have been embarrassed to give their real answer to pollsters given whatever the news of the day happened to be while the poll was being taken.

Except I didn't really follow that methodology for PA (even though I'm pretty sure if I had checked the polling/election prediction history for the state, it would come out the same). I think I have a better sense of my home state and I just don't buy the claim that PA swings at all. It has been a blue state in every presidential election, since the 1980s. It doesn't make sense to me why everyone insists it is a swinger every presidential year despite over a quarter century of blueness. (Contrast Louisiana, which everyone thinks of as a reliably red state, was blue in both 1992 and 1996)

I still really do hope that UT goes with McMillin. I even went so far as to make a prior draft of this map with a 347-185-6 split and with UT colored yellow. But eventually I recognized that map is mostly wishful thinking on my part. Of course, my adding this paragraph, I am implicitly reserving the right to post "I told you so" in case McMillin does pull it off in UT and the rest of my map is correct.

Anyway, you can create your own here, or on a bunch of other sites. I liked 270 to Win's map because it gave the option for a third color (if McMillin, or someone else took a state), and it lets you do a split electoral vote for ME and NE, even though I ultimately did not use any of those features for my map.

ADDENDUM: Does anyone know why, when I look at this post from the mobile version of my site, the map imagine is squished down like someone stomped on it? You can see the whole (unsquished) map if you click on it, but it doesn't display in any readable form along with the rest of the post. Meanwhile, it looks fine on the desktop site. What's the deal and how do I fix it?

Undone

Almost a month ago, I revealed how I would decide that the presidential election is so lopsided it's effectively over and I could start worrying about something else. (That standard is if 538's "polls only" forecast had Clinton's chances of winning Texas higher than Trump's chances to win the presidency). Two days later, the standard was met and I deemed the election effectively done.

So does this mean that it is undone?

Actually, I'm not really worried, at least not on a conscious level. Intellectually, I'm still pretty confident that Clinton will win and I even think she will win by a comfortable margin, at least in the electoral college. But there is a lot of tension in the air--at least among my friends and co-workers. So I do feel tense about it. I'm looking forward to Wednesday.

has anyone updated those rules in the last 100 years?

The punishment for a suicide attempt in prison is solitary confinement?!?!? That's insane. Solitary confinement is mental torture. It causes people to have mental breakdowns. Penalizing someone for exhibiting mental illness by doing something that causes further mental illness makes no sense at all.

The blockade and retiring justices

Putting aside the Garland nomination, if the Republicans do blockade all Supreme Court nominations during Clinton's presidency, what will that do to Supreme Court retirements? Liberal justices tend to try to time their retirement for when Democrats hold the presidency, and conservative justices generally time their retirement for when Republicans hold the presidency. If the Republicans promise to not confirm any new justice, will that mean that liberal justices won't retire?

I guess it could go the other way too. If Clinton ends up with a Senate majority when she is initially elected, that majority is only guaranteed to hold for the first two years of her presidency (before the 2018 midterms). So will this blockade talk lead to a rush of liberal Supreme Court retirements? Could all this crazy blockade talk get Clinton more appointments to the Supreme Court?

Republicans know they can't elect a president. That is why they are now talking about blocking judicial appointments.

Senate Republicans have refused to even hold hearings over Obama's appointee for Scalia's seat on the Supreme Court for more than seven months. For most of that time, the Republican line has been that the people should be allowed to decide about the nomination, meaning that the nomination should wait until after the next presidential election. At that point the public would get to vote on who should be appointing Justices, as expressed in their presidential vote. (Never mind that the people already decided who should be making those appointments during the current presidential term when they voted in 2012).

Recently, however, the Republican line has begun to shift. A few weeks ago, John McCain suggested that the Senate should block anyone that Hillary Clinton might appoint to the Supreme Court after she is sworn in. Those comments caused an outcry and McCain walked it back the next day. Or so it seemed. Last week, Ilya Shapiro wrote a piece in The Federalist advocating that Senate Republicans should refuse to confirm all of Clinton's judicial nominees (not just her Supreme Court nominees). The same day Ted Cruz floated the idea of keeping Scalia's Supreme Court seat open indefinitely. North Carolina Senator Richard Burr seems to have signed on to that plan, saying "If Hillary becomes president, I’m going to do everything I can do to make sure that four years from now, we’re still going to have an opening on the Supreme Court" Today, Marco Rubio indicated that he may have signed on to the blockade, saying that he would block any nominee that is not good, but also adding that Hillary Clinton would not nominate anyone good.

(I should note that there is a difference between voting against a nominee that a Senator does not like and refusing to hold any hearing or allow any other senator to vote on the nomination, which is what Mitch McConnell has done since March. Some of the above statements are ambiguous whether the Senator is talking about voting against a nominee, or stopping the nomination process entirely).

To the best of my knowledge, this kind of talk is unprecedented. In the past Senators have at least pretended to have an open mind, making statements about how they would ask the nominees hard questions at the hearing, or consider carefully whether they are really qualified for the job, etc. I do not think Senators have ruled out considering Supreme Court nominees just because they were appointed by a particular president.

The reason why in the past senators did not announced a total blockade of nominees from a president of the opposing party is because each senator knows that eventually his party will get another shot at the presidency. If Republicans block every Clinton nominee, then Democrats are going to feel free to block every nominee of a future president. Anyone who wants their side to ever get their nominee confirmed has got to allow the other side to get some nominees through now and then.

So why the break from tradition now? It could be because the current Republican party is remarkably short-sighted. On this and other issues, it seems that they are not thinking about the long term effects of their actions (e.g. alienating the largest growing minority in the country, forcing a government shut down with no plausible end game, flirting with a default on the debt, etc)

But I have another theory. This could be a tacit acknowledgment that the Republicans chances of capturing the White House in the near future are really bad. Currently, the Republicans are at a real disadvantage whenever there is a high turnout election like presidential elections are, and the electoral map gives the Democrats an inherent advantage each presidential election (i.e. the Blue Wall) Those disadvantages are bound to get worse for the Republicans as demographic trends are decreasing their core voters' share of the electorate while increasing the share of minorities who tend to vote Democratic. The Republicans could try to change the map and make a play for those minorities by catering to their concerns (as the Republican's autopsy report for the 2012 election advised them to do), but this election has pretty clearly demonstrated that the Republican base won't tolerate that. So what that leaves them with is a losing hand in every presidential election for the foreseeable future.

Once you assume that Republicans probably won't recapture the White House, the premise behind compromising on Supreme Court and other judicial appointments evaporates. The growing Republican opposition to letting any Democratic nominees on the court is part of the realization of Republican weakness in the Presidential race.

Walker needs to step outside now and then

More evidence to back my theory that the rightwing media is a major liability for the Republican party: this tweet by Scott Walker.

President Obama is popular. I think most people know that, but not the people who get their news exclusively from rightwing sources. If you just watched Fox News or read Breitbart and Drudge, you would never know that most Americans like the president. Because Walker lives in the bubble, he inadvertently made an arguent to vote for Hillary Clinton.

A reminder

For most (all?) Clinton scandals, if you look hard enough, there is nothing there to see.

Adding: Similarly.