US Election 2016

From the “Reality has a well-known liberal bias” file

[quote] There continues to be a lot of misinformation about what has happened during Obama’s time in office. 43% of voters think the unemployment rate has increased while Obama has been President, to only 49% who correctly recognize that it has decreased. And 32% of voters think the stock market has gone down during the Obama administration, to only 52% who correctly recognize that it has gone up.

In both cases Democrats and independents are correct in their understanding of how things have changed since Obama became President, but Republicans claim by a 64/27 spread that unemployment has increased and by a 57/27 spread that the stock market has gone down.[/quote]
msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show … ap-matters

The poll
publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/ … _51116.pdf

Just the facts, ma’am


But Dnald Trump told us it was 42%- would the Republican nominee for POTUS peddle such absurd lies? Would the average Republican be dumb enough to believe it, or dishonest enough to claim they believe it?

Dow Jones

Republicans, the party of post-modernism: reality as a social construct

[quote]Who denies that real unemployment today, including those who have given up looking for work and are working part-time is close to 10 percent?[/quote]–Bernie Sanders

did he? I think he said it was more like 20% and he heard some people say it might be 30 and one person said it was 42%. You want to quote statistics and then play fast and loose with the facts?

How do you get 42%? Its pretty easy really, depends what you are measuring, want to include under 18 and over 65? Obviously unemployed i.e. dont have a job, but thats not where the numbers come from.

Housewife’s not included, disabled people who draw a disability allowance not included, people who have been out of work for more than 6 months, not included. Where do you start the lower age limit, 21? 24?

So even the definition of unemployed changes, usually to make whoever is in power look good. Did the ratio of full time jobs to part time jobs change?

Just saying, because your graph is so misleading, this is unemployment in US with a little context.

yeah, so, someone forgot to mention the recession.

More context behind the numbers:

[quote]The middle class is shrinking all over.

According to a Pew Research Center study released Thursday, however, it’s shrinking faster in Bend than almost anywhere else in the country. Portland shows a bigger decline than the national average, too.

Oregon’s four metro areas included in the Pew study — Bend, Eugene, Medford and Portland — all followed the national trend to some extent. Pew found that the middle class was smaller in 2014 than it was in 2000 in 203 out of 229 U.S. metropolitan areas surveyed.

Pew defines “middle class” as adults whose annual household income is between two-thirds and two times the national median, based on the number of people in the household. In 2014, the national middle-income range was about $42,000 to $125,000 annually for a household of three.[/quote]

So, yes, the unemployment rate is down and going lower and there are plenty of jobs. The problem – as the ongoing decline of the middle class indicates – is it’s Home Depot and The Old Spaghetti Factory which are on hiring sprees while Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Yahoo etc. are laying off or on the cusp of large layoffs.

Of course it is. That is U6. It has come down from 17% in 2009.

macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate

[quote=“Mick”][quote=“MikeN”]

But Dnald Trump told us it was 42%- would the Republican nominee for POTUS peddle such absurd lies? Would the average Republican be dumb enough to believe it, or dishonest enough to claim they believe it?

[/quote]

did he? I think he said it was more like 20% and he heard some people say it might be 30 and one person said it was 42%. You want to quote statistics and then play fast and loose with the facts?[/quote]

You’re right!- my apologies to Mr. Trump; he blew it up by 4 times, not eight, though he did say he heard it might be as high as 42%.

Politifact:

[quote]During the Sept. 28, 2015, media event, Trump described an unemployment rate in the range of 5 percent as “such a phony number.”

“The number isn’t reflective,” he said. “I’ve seen numbers of 24 percent – I actually saw a number of 42 percent unemployment. Forty-two percent.” He continued, “5.3 percent unemployment – that is the biggest joke there is in this country. … The unemployment rate is probably 20 percent, but I will tell you, you have some great economists that will tell you it’s a 30, 32. And the highest I’ve heard so far is 42 percent.”

We previously rated False a claim by Trump that “our real unemployment is anywhere from 18 to 20 percent”.
[/quote]
politifact.com/truth-o-meter … e-42-perc/

Mick:

The number comes from David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s Budget Director, he of the magic asterisk and rosy scenarios. As the Politico article explains, he took everyone in the country from the age of 16 to 68, calculated how many hours would be worked if every single person in that group was working full-time- high school students, college students, retirees, housewives, prisoners, the mentally and physically disabled, non-working wealthy, voluntary part-timers- and divided it by the number of people in that group.

Mick:

[quote]Housewife’s not included, disabled people who draw a disability allowance not included, people who have been out of work for more than 6 months, not included. Where do you start the lower age limit, 21? 24?

So even the definition of unemployed changes, usually to make whoever is in power look good. Did the ratio of full time jobs to part time jobs change?[/quote]

The definition of unemployed doesn’t change; there are different categories (for age 16 to 65 -or is it 66 now?)

[quote]The Bureau of Labor Statistics also calculates six alternate [sic: should be alternative; sorry, personal grammar pet peeve :no-no: ] measures of unemployment, U1 through U6, that measure different aspects of unemployment

U1: Percentage of labor force unemployed 15 weeks or longer.
U2: Percentage of labor force who lost jobs or completed temporary work.
U3: Official unemployment rate per the ILO definition occurs when people are without jobs and they have actively looked for work within the past four weeks.
U4: U3 + "discouraged workers", or those who have stopped looking for work because current economic conditions make them believe that no work is available for them.
U5: U4 + other "marginally attached workers", or "loosely attached workers", or those who "would like" and are able to work, but have not looked for work recently.
U6: U5 + Part-time workers who want to work full-time, but cannot due to economic reasons (underemployment)[/quote].

So, yes, politicians often switch between the different official measures when they want to fudge the numbers in their favor.
This is also a problem with international comparisons. Check the graph in the reply I gave to Winston Smith
2009-2016:
U3: 10% to 5%
U5: 11.4% to 6%
U6: 17% to 9.7%

Mick:

The quote in my original post, referring to the original question in the poll:

So, yes, it’s possible that the people replying to this question are actually so ignorant that they don’t know what year Obama became president.

[quote=“Winston Smith”]More context behind the numbers:

[quote]The middle class is shrinking all over.

According to a Pew Research Center study released Thursday, however, it’s shrinking faster in Bend than almost anywhere else in the country. Portland shows a bigger decline than the national average, too.

Oregon’s four metro areas included in the Pew study — Bend, Eugene, Medford and Portland — all followed the national trend to some extent. Pew found that the middle class was smaller in 2014 than it was in 2000 in 203 out of 229 U.S. metropolitan areas surveyed.

Pew defines “middle class” as adults whose annual household income is between two-thirds and two times the national median, based on the number of people in the household. In 2014, the national middle-income range was about $42,000 to $125,000 annually for a household of three.[/quote]

So, yes, the unemployment rate is down and going lower and there are plenty of jobs. The problem – as the ongoing decline of the middle class indicates – is it’s Home Depot and The Old Spaghetti Factory which are on hiring sprees while Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Yahoo etc. are laying off or on the cusp of large layoffs.[/quote]

Yep- that’s what I was arguing with Brentgolf about before.

Of course it is. That is U6. It has come down from 17% in 2009.[/quote]

Despite their overall ignorance the thing that “conservatives” like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump seem to get that their more intelligent liberal brethren don’t seem to is the reality that average Americans don’t care about statistics. They care about the fact that they lost ground under Bush and they’re continuing to lose ground under Obama because that $17 an hour job with benefits that’s heading to Mexico just isn’t the same as those two part-time, U3 replacement jobs with no benefits at Walmart and Arby’s.

From Hope and Change to Resentment in Indiana

[quote]HUNTINGTON, Ind. — . . . It had been two months since Setser and 800 others in Huntington were told their manufacturing jobs would soon be outsourced to Mexico, but so far nothing about his routine had changed. He was still making $17 an hour on the third-shift line at United Technologies. The first layoffs wouldn’t take place for a year, maybe more. “We’ll be fine because we’ve always been fine,” Setser had said again and again, to his fiancee, his four children, and most of all to himself, but he was beginning to wonder if the loss of something more foundational in Huntington was underway. . . . .

[color=blue]All around him an ideological crisis was spreading across Middle America as it continued its long fall into dependency: median wages down across the country, average income down, total wealth down in the past decade by 28 percent. For the first time ever, the vaunted middle class was not the country’s base but a disenfranchised minority, down from 61 percent of the population in the 1970s to just 49 percent as of last year. As a result of that decline, confusion was turning into fear. Fear was giving way to resentment. Resentment was hardening into a sense of outrage that was unhinging the country’s politics and upending a presidential election. . . . [/color]

Stride Rite had left Huntington for Mexico at the tail end of the recession; Breyers Ice Cream had closed its doors after 100 years. [color=blue]In the weeks after each factory closing in his part of Indiana, Lewandowski had listened to politicians make promises about jobs — high-tech jobs, right-to-work jobs, clean-energy jobs — but instead Indiana had lost 60,000 middle-class jobs in the past decade and replaced them with a surge of low-paying work in health care, hospitality and fast food.[/color] Wages of male high school graduates had dropped 19 percent in the past two decades, and the wealth divide between the middle class and the upper class had quadrupled. . . .

“We’re getting to the point where there aren’t really any good options left,” he said. “The system is broken. Maybe its time to blow it up and start from scratch, like Trump’s been saying.”

Krystal rolled her eyes at him. “Come on. You’re a Democrat.”

“I was. But that was before we started turning into a weak country,” he said. “Pretty soon there won’t be anything left. We’ll all be flipping burgers.”

“Fine, but so what?” she said. “We just turn everything over to the guy who yells the loudest?”

Setser leaned into the table and banged it once for emphasis. “They’re throwing our work back in our face,” he said. “China is doing better. Even Mexico is doing better. Don’t you want someone to go kick ass?”[/quote]

twitter.com/neontaster/status/7 … 7258940416

What the clan needs is triplets named Dewey, Cheatham and Howe.

LOL

Now that the primaries are over, and the Republican Convention has started, time to gear up for the Main Event.

The media is once more covering itself with glory; their breathless non-stop coverage of Day One of the Convention has been of whether Melania Trump, a non-native speaker of English, in the candidate’s spouse’s traditional “My husband is wonderful plus other assorted vacuities” speech, actually said a couple of sentences that closely resembled some similar platitudes once mouthed by Michelle Obama.

It’s gonna be a long four months.

[quote=“MikeN”]Now that the primaries are over, and the Republican Convention has started, time to gear up for the Main Event.

The media is once more covering itself with glory; their breathless non-stop coverage of Day One of the Convention has been of whether Melania Trump, a non-native speaker of English, in the candidate’s spouse’s traditional “My husband is wonderful plus other assorted vacuities” speech, actually said a couple of sentences that closely resembled some similar platitudes once mouthed by Michelle Obama.[/quote]
Well, of course it was plagiarized. I assume a speechwriter was lazy and/or incompetent, although Melania’s claim that she wrote the speech does mean she takes some of the blame too. These mistakes happen, but to me the bigger issue is the Trump camp’s ludicrous attempts to claim it wasn’t plagiarized.

But I’ve read lots of other stuff in the media too, all about the drumbeat of fear coming out of Cleveland, or who these assorted celebrities were.

Apparently one of the most emotionally charged moments of the first night was when Pat Smith, whose son was killed at Benghazi, was personally blaming Hillary Clinton for his death (ignoring for now that it’s not true), and right in the middle Donald Trump called in to Bill O’Reilly to talk about…Donald Trump, of course, causing Fox News to cut away from its convention coverage to cover Trump simply repeating things he’s said many times before.

[quote]Patricia Smith stood on the stage of the Republican National Convention and emotionally blamed the death of her son in Benghazi, Libya, on Hillary Clinton. Suddenly, Fox News Channel cut away to interview the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Donald Trump.

For nearly 11 minutes on Monday night, Trump overshadowed his party’s convention with a telephone interview that provided no major news but allowed him to brag about his primary victories, attack the news media and plug his wife’s upcoming speech.[/quote]

washingtonpost.com/politics

I mean, he must have known she was speaking at the time, as it was being covered live by Fox- presumably he just couldn’t stand the thought that somebody wasn’t talking about him. Totally bizarre- for anyone else.

[quote=“lostinasia”][quote=“MikeN”]Now that the primaries are over, and the Republican Convention has started, time to gear up for the Main Event.

The media is once more covering itself with glory; their breathless non-stop coverage of Day One of the Convention has been of whether Melania Trump, a non-native speaker of English, in the candidate’s spouse’s traditional “My husband is wonderful plus other assorted vacuities” speech, actually said a couple of sentences that closely resembled some similar platitudes once mouthed by Michelle Obama.[/quote]
Well, of course it was plagiarized. I assume a speechwriter was lazy and/or incompetent, although Melania’s claim that she wrote the speech does mean she takes some of the blame too. These mistakes happen, but to me the bigger issue is the Trump camp’s ludicrous attempts to claim it wasn’t plagiarized.

But I’ve read lots of other stuff in the media too, all about the drumbeat of fear coming out of Cleveland, or who these assorted celebrities were.[/quote]

The whole thing smells like a setup to me. Melania Trump’s speechwriters are apparently saying the speech they wrote isn’t the one she delivered and some nobody in California happens to remember in real time the wording from a speech Michelle Obama gave eight years before. Not that it matters in the big scheme of things because Trump is a clown who’s going down but, speaking for myself, who likes to be played for a fool?

I confess I wondered that too - plagiarizing from Michelle Obama seems too perfectly ironic.

I assume there are other post-mortem explanations out there, but the only one I’ve seen so far is from the New York Times:

[quote]The Trump campaign turned to two high-powered speechwriters, who had helped write signature political oratory like George W. Bush’s speech to the nation on Sept. 11, 2001, to introduce Ms. Trump, a Slovenian-born former model, to the nation on the opening night of the Republican National Convention.

The speechwriters, Matthew Scully and John McConnell, sent Ms. Trump a draft last month, eager for her approval.

Weeks went by. They heard nothing.

Inside Trump Tower, it turned out, Ms. Trump had decided she was uncomfortable with the text, and began tearing it apart, leaving a small fraction of the original.

It was Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser, who commissioned the speech from Mr. Scully and Mr. McConnell — and praised their draft. But Ms. Trump decided to revise it, and at one point she turned to a trusted hand: Meredith McIver, a New York City-based former ballet dancer and English major who has worked on some of Mr. Trump’s books, including “Think Like a Billionaire.” It was not clear how much of a hand Ms. McIver had in the final product, and she did not respond to an email on Tuesday.

Research for the speech, it seems, drew them to the previous convention speeches delivered by candidates’ spouses.

The Trump campaign declined to say who or how many senior campaign officials read or reviewed the speech. But when Ms. Trump and her staff had finished revising the speech, virtually all that remained from the original was an introduction and a passage that included the phrase “a national campaign like no other.”
[/quote]

She stole all twenty-six letters - A through Z - from Joe Biden.

It was just boilerplate. None of it meant anything when anyone said it. Perhaps Melania was subtly mocking Michelle, but more likely it’s a coincidence - mediocre minds think alike.

But, a great way to attack a hated person while avoiding serious discussion. Very childish on the art of the media, but par for the course.

Does anyone remember Biden’s penchant for plagiarism? Or Il Douche’s? This sort of thing is forgotten over time, because it simply doesn’t matter.

I do like the GOP’s new official slogan:

“She’s a witch! Burn her!!”

“She turned me into a Newt!”

[quote]Ted Cruz refused to endorse Donald Trump in daring and dramatic fashion on Wednesday, telling Republicans to “vote your conscience” in a 20-minute snub that played out in slow-motion on national television.

Boos rained down on Cruz and his wife had to be escorted from the hall amid verbal taunts in an unreal scene that marked an end to a surreal primary season.

“Wow, Ted Cruz got booed off the stage, didn’t honor the pledge! I saw his speech two hours early but let him speak anyway. No big deal!” he wrote.[/quote]

politico.com/story/2016/07/r … z4F0sGpPCw

Dumb- you do a Rubio, mention the Donald in passing, and go on to denounce the evil witch.
In 2020 you’re the Unity candidate.

I feel so overwhelmed at these various elections. Can we just fast forward about 5-10 years to the revolutions, civil wars and four horsemen?