US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2656

At 11.30pm Paris time, a small group of White House officials dashed into a temporary plywood hut in the exhibition hall where, a few hours earlier, a historic legal agreement to cut emissions causing climate change was secured. They were just in time to catch a live feed of Barack Obama declaring “a turning point for the world”.

These were the officials who helped set the US negotiating position for the talks – or, perhaps more accurately, helped craft the deal according to US specifications in order to insulate Obama and the agreement from attacks.

When it came to Republicans in Congress, they wanted the agreement to be bullet-proof. That was no easy feat in a negotiation over an immensely complicated challenge involving nearly 200 countries, and half a dozen rival negotiating blocs.

“We met the moment,” Obama said in his address. The Paris agreement on its own would not end climate change, he said, but “this agreement will help delay or avoid some of the worst consequences of climate change, and will pave the way for even more progress, in successive stages, over the coming years”.

Nonetheless, the fight over the deal began even before French workers could finish dismantling the conference site. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, led the attack for Republicans.

“The president is making promises he can’t keep, writing checks he can’t cash, and stepping over the middle class to take credit for an ‘agreement’ that is subject to being shredded in 13 months,” McConnell said.

The deal reached in Paris set goals to limit warming, phase out carbon emissions by the middle of the century, help poor countries realign their economies, and review their progress towards hitting those targets at regular intervals.

Jim Inhofe, the chair of the Senate environment and public works committee, who holds views on global warming outside the scientific mainstream, said he would continue to scrutinise Obama’s climate agenda. Inhofe and other committee chairs in Congress have held hearings seeking to undermine the Paris climate meeting and the work of government scientific agencies.

“The United States is not legally bound to any agreement setting emissions targets or any financial commitment to it without approval by Congress,” Inhofe said in a statement.

Meanwhile, campaigners plan to use the agreement to push Obama to stop Congress lifting a ban on oil exports in the budget bill, and to phase out fossil fuel extraction on public lands.

But as administration officials pointed out after the deal was done, the agreement reached in Paris was constructed with a view to making it safe from Republican attacks – which was one reason negotiations were so difficult.

On December 15 2015 01:08 Mercy13 wrote:
Since this election it doesn't look like ad spending is affecting candidate popularity (because people just tune them out maybe?) it looks like the biggest/only beneficiaries of Citizens United so far have been political consultants.

Top officials with Hillary Clinton’s campaign have started assessing the strength of local Democratic parties and ordering up investments to correct organizational deficiencies and financial shortfalls in the battleground states she will need in her column to win the White House.

The calls and visits from senior members of Clinton’s team, who have zeroed in on local party efforts to build political muscle, have left state officials in a “holding pattern” as they wait for guidance from Brooklyn on everything from finance to strategy to hiring, said two dozen Democratic leaders in New York, Washington, Virginia, Florida, Ohio, and Colorado.

High-level Clinton aides’ interest in the Ohio Democratic Party’s growing field program as a tool for the lead-up to November 2016 “encourages us, our volunteers and our donors, to put more resources into this effort,” said state party executive director Greg Beswick.

But, added another senior Democratic Party official based in a swing state, when it comes to setting the national party’s agenda, “the entire building has been waiting for the Clinton team to take over.”

The health of state parties has been an obsession for both Bill and Hillary Clinton for years, and the candidate has been closely watching some of them since 2013, knowing that a strong ground game and finance operation in Florida and Ohio in particular could make the difference between a Democrat and a Republican in the White House. So she made revitalizing the decimated state infrastructures a focus of her 2016 effort shortly after launching her bid in April.

Eager to avoid looking like it's taking past the primary for granted — a perception that helped doom Clinton in 2008 — her team says the check-ins with state parties are a routine part of her campaign and that she is focused on competing for the nomination. Indeed many of the visits and calls have occurred in likely swing states that vote in the primary in February or March — like Colorado, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia. And the campaign has brought on paid staffers in safe Democratic states that vote in March too, such as Massachusetts.

On December 15 2015 01:37 Plansix wrote:

This is the darkest truth of citizens united, that is mostly allowed people to sell the idea that spending money will sway voters. But in fact people are so aware of the amount of money being spent and cynical about political adds, it does nothing. It turned the volume up so high that people just ignore it.

I think there is a valid argument that so much money makes the candidates themselves less visible and is harmful to the political process. Not because money isn’t free speech, but the average voter just chooses not to engage rather than sift through the unlimited number of half truths. That unlimited money make the political process crappier for everyone, expect the people placing the ads and 24/7 news networks scrambling for viewers.

A new national poll out Monday shows real estate mogul Donald Trump surging ahead by his widest margin yet, with the Republican presidential candidate cementing himself as the GOP frontrunner by almost 30 points.

Trump hit 41 percent national support among Republican and GOP-leaning voters in the December Monmouth University Poll, a marked increase from 28 percent in its October poll, to hit his widest lead of any national poll this cycle. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) saw a more modest 4-point boost to 14 percent support, good enough for second place in the still-crowded Republican field.


Behind Cruz, 10 percent of voters said they would back Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), 9 percent backed retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, and 3 percent supported both former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. No other candidate for the Republican nomination reached above two percent support.

The poll is likely an unwelcome shock to the GOP establishment, who have started hatching behind-closed-doors plans to derail Trump's campaign. In response to those reports, Cruz has pointedly refused to take Trump's bait and Carson, once a top flight contender with the billionaire, threatened to leave the party altogether.

Polls Suggest Trump Will Win Between 8 Percent And 64 Percent Of The Vote

In 2007, I woke up every morning — alarm set with a 1980s or ’90s TV show theme song — opened my computer and searched the term “poll” on Google. I did this through the spring, summer, fall and winter. And when I did, I saw the same person leading the Republican presidential contest: Rudy Giuliani. I thought Giuliani had a great chance of winning the nomination. You see, no Republican who had led for so long had ever lost the nomination: Ronald Reagan in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1988, Bob Dole in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2000 — they all easily won.

Welp.

Giuliani, of course, didn’t come close to winning. Eight years ago, I didn’t know what I know now: Although Giuliani led the field, he was polling at only around 30 percent in the last couple of months of 2007, while all the previous nominees above were polling at about 40 percent or higher. That distinction is lost when you’re just looking at whether someone is a front-runner or not, and it’s why it’s a mistake to make too much of binary outcomes in small data sets. Beware pundits proffering “no candidate has ever lost when …” rules.

It’s better to look at a continuous variable, such as how well polling in the past has predicted the eventual vote percentages of the candidates. If I had done that in 2008, I would have known that polls even at this stage in a primary campaign — a couple of months before the voting starts — still have a wide predictive margin of error compared with the final national outcome.

Now, we have Donald Trump. He’s led in almost every national poll, with an average of 32 percent over the past month. He’s opened up a lead in New Hampshire, with 27 percent over the past month. And he may or may not lead in Iowa, with an average of 25 percent. These leads aren’t meaningless. But, historically, similar levels of support have been more likely to end with a share of the national vote that wasn’t enough to win the nomination.

You can see this in the chart below, where for every candidate since 1980, I’ve plotted a monthly average of each candidate’s support in national polls a little less than two months before the Iowa caucuses against the candidate’s actual national primary results.1 I’ve included both Democratic and Republican primaries to boost the sample size, though it makes no difference to the conclusion.

You can see there’s definitely a correlation. Six of the 12 eventual nominees were leading at this point in the national polls. But they were all polling better than Trump is now. Not only that, but 52 percent of the variation in the eventual results go unexplained. That’s a mathy way of saying that a lot tends to happen from this point on. There have been collapses: Giuliani in 2008 and John Glenn in 1984. There have been surges: Barack Obama in 2008 and John Kerry in 2004. Glenn, for example, consistently polled as well or better than Trump is nationally and in the early primary states, and Glenn fell off the map completely once voting began.

Put another way, past campaigns suggest that 95 percent of the time, Trump’s eventual percentage of the national primary vote will be between 8 percent and 64 percent. And there’s reason to think Trump will end up on the lower end of that range. He doesn’t have a single endorsement from a governor or member of Congress, and those endorsements have historically been predictive of the eventual winner.

What’s amazing is that polls at this point in the campaign are no more predictive than a January-to-June polling average from the year before the primary. The predictive margin of error is the same, as is the correlation between the national polls and the result. That may seem counterintuitive, but as we’ve said many times, voters simply aren’t paying attention yet. Yes, we are further along in the primary process, but voter attention only gradually ramps up; as my colleague Nate Silver has pointed out, voters start to really tune in after the Iowa caucuses.

This is one reason I don’t put much stock in the argument that Trump’s lead is somehow more meaningful because it’s lasted this long. Winning a pretty meaningless metric for a long time doesn’t magically make that metric meaningful.

But what about Iowa and New Hampshire?2 Polls of those states don’t do any better in predicting the candidates’ eventual vote share.3


Like with the national polls, there is a correlation, but there is often a large difference between what the polls say at this point and what happens. Again, this shouldn’t be surprising. What occurs in the Iowa caucuses will affect the New Hampshire primary, which will, in turn, affect future primaries. And even if Iowa and New Hampshire voters are paying more attention to the campaign at this point, they often wait until the final month and weeks before their contests to decide which candidates to back.

What about candidates who managed to lead in Iowa, New Hampshire and nationally at this point?4 Four won their nominations comfortably (Reagan in 1980, Dole in 1996, Bush in 2000 and Al Gore in 2000), and Walter Mondale held on for dear life against Gary Hart in 1984. Two went on to lose: Howard Dean in 2004 and Hillary Clinton in 2008. A major difference between the winners and losers is that the winners were polling high across the board. That is, their support wasn’t just wide, it was deep.

So are Trump’s polling numbers meaningless? No. As I keep saying, there is a correlation between the polls now and the eventual result. Trump could easily end up with 20 percent or 30 percent of the national primary vote based on his polling right now. He could also win. History tells us, however, that the current polls guarantee nothing, and Trump could stay a factional candidate, never expand his support and get passed by another candidate. Given that the GOP establishment will do everything in its power to stop Trump, I’m leaning heavily toward this scenario.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) didn't file millions of dollars worth of investments and profits he received since coming to the Senate in 2007, according to a report in the The Wall Street Journal Sunday.

According to the Journal, Corker filed amendments to his financial disclosure forms late Friday after the paper had previously inquired about several inconsistencies in Corker's finances.

Senators may engage in outside business activities and investments, but under Senate rules they must disclose their assets and incomes. Corker is a high-ranking Republican on the Senate's banking committee.

The Journal reported that the new filings show Corker made $2 million in hedge fund profits as well as millions more through his commercial real estate business.

In a statement Friday, Corker told the Wall Street Journal that he regretted any accounting errors.

“I am extremely disappointed in the filing errors that were made in earlier financial disclosure reports," Corker told the Journal. “After completing a full, third-party review, we have corrected this oversight."

While Corker appears to have corrected the reports, the senator still faces the ire of watchdog groups like the Campaign for Accountability. That group's president Anne Weismann told the Wall Street Journal that she was planning to file an ethics complaint against Corker.

On December 14 2015 00:37 MaCRo.gg wrote:


There is no way that he is actually this dumb irl. He went to a top tier business school in Wharton, even if it is more based off of his family money than merit there is no way he could've built what he has without way more intelligence than he is showing now.
Hardliners in the GOP know the truth, he is a Democrat agent campaigning to ruin the GOP. Everyone knows how close the Clintons are with Trump...

The black Ford F-250 started life as a truck for a Texas-based plumbing company, carrying toilets, pipes and other supplies. But then it was sold to a Ford dealership in Houston, and after that, shepherded off to parts unknown. Until, that is, it appeared as the focal point of a tweet from a supposed extremist last December.

The photo indicated that the truck no longer carried ceramic parts; emerging from its cargo bed were a black-cloaked figure and an antiaircraft gun. According to the tweet, the truck was being used by Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar (the “Muhajireen Brigade”), an extremist group fighting the Syrian government.

Yet even with its function entirely transformed, the truck still bore the insignia of its past life, a decal that clearly read: “Mark-1 Plumbing.”

Underneath this large lettering was an equally clear label of the company’s phone number — a number that, after the photo went viral within days of posting, began ringing nonstop.

On the other end of these mostly caustic calls was Mark Oberholtzer, owner of Mark-1 Plumbing in Texas City, whose reputation rapidly went from small-business owner to terrorist sympathizer. He wasn’t the latter, of course, but the widely shared picture of his old truck spoke louder than his plaintive explanations.

“How it ended up in Syria, I’ll never know,” Oberholtzer told the Galveston County Daily News at the time. “I just want it to go away, to tell you the truth.”

The US government has not halted a single project out of the 88,000 actions and developments considered potentially harmful to the nation’s endangered species over the past seven years, a new study has found.

An analysis of assessments made by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the agency very rarely used its powers to intervene in projects that could imperil any of the US’s endangered plants and animals, which currently number almost 1,600.

Of 88,000 actions assessed by the FWS between January 2008 and April 2015, just two triggered significant further action. A 2007 plan to drop fire retardant in California was deemed by the FWS to be prohibitively harmful to forest-dwelling endangered species, although this was challenged in court. The FWS also stepped in over a plan to divert water from the San Francisco Bay Delta due to concerns over the impact to threatened fish.

In both cases the FWS used a regulation called section seven, which requires a federal agency to consult with the wildlife regulator if it is undertaking, funding or authorizing an action that may be detrimental to an endangered species.

Following an assessment, the FWS can rule that the project would jeopardizes the ongoing survival of the species and require that the project either be halted or altered to lessen the impact. Projects can include developments such as roads and buildings that require a habitat to be flattened or destroyed.

According to Defenders of Wildlife, a wildlife welfare group that conducted the analysis, the FWS is intervening in a diminishing number of cases. A tally from 1991 shows that there were 350 “jeopardy judgements” out of 73,560 previous consultations, compared with the two adverse outcomes in 80,000 cases over the past seven years.

Defenders of Wildlife said that the analysis shows it is misleading to claim that federal wildlife regulations are hampering development and harming jobs.

On December 15 2015 05:52 ragz_gt wrote:
That's my biggest problem with Carson. He seems to be totally oblivious that his endeavor as a physician does not give him superior understanding to all things in existence. We don't let rocket scientists operate on people, why do people think neurosurgeon would do any better as a politician?